Home

I recently opened my RSS reader to get caught up on my business reading. I was greeted with these eight new posts from a particular blog.

Would you have clicked and read any of these posts?

The first post got me curious and I read it. However, I skipped the other posts because their titles didn’t seem useful, interesting, or relevant.

This small event reminded me of the importance of writing attractive post titles.

Judging a Post by the Title

Those seven posts that I didn’t read may have been great posts, but since the titles were subpar, I didn’t even read them.

It may be unfair to judge a post by the title alone. But in our busy world where time and attention are scarce, people are making quick judgments on what information they will consume.

Usually your post titles are the first words people notice. Those words are the prominent words on RSS readers, search engine results pages, and social media sites like Digg. When internet users land on your blog home page, they’ll look at your titles and see if it’s worth reading your blog.

Writing Great Titles

Luckily, you don’t have to be an expert wordsmith to write good titles. There are simple yet effective principles. I’ll talk about some of these principles in future posts, so stick around.

Until then, here are 22 title templates that work well. Try them out on your next posts.

Photo by alifarid

The key to writing interesting content is being reader focused.

A common mistake in blogging is to only write about what interests you. However, by neglecting the interests of your readers, you’ll miss out on a lot of new traffic and repeat visitors.

If you follow some of the top blogs, you’ll find that they’ll often get comments like “This is exactly what I was looking for” or “I definitely needed to hear this”. Those bloggers understand what their audiences want and they give it to them on a consistent basis. That’s what makes their blogs so successful.

How to Figure Out What Your Readers are Interested In

So, how do you find out what your readers want? Here are a couple practical methods.

Browsing through forums is an excellent way to do research on your target audience. What you want to look for are threads that get a lot of responses. The topics on these threads are perfect topics for future blog posts. Also, watch out for recurring questions. Many people go to forums to ask questions. Writing in-depth blog posts that answer those questions will earn you a reputation as an expert.

While were talking about questions, Yahoo! Answers is another place where people ask questions. Simply search using common keywords in your niche and see what questions people are asking in your niche.

Keyword tools tell you the popular words in your industry that internet users are searching with. Writing blog posts based on these keywords will not only make your blog more interesting but it will increase your search engine traffic. Here are two free tools to try out: Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in the name of your industry and see what related words the tool gives you.

If you have a lot of traffic or a big enough email list, it’s a good idea just to ask your readers what kind of content they want. If you have little traffic or a small list, you might not get a lot of responses.

You Don’t Have to Guess

You could guess what content your audience finds interesting. But why guess if you don’t have to? A little bit of research before writing can go a long way to making your blog more interesting.

Photo by nms_007

Many business owners understand that starting a business blog is a good idea. However, they are hesitant to start blogging because the last time they wrote anything was years ago back in school. They don’t feel like they have the writing skill to attract an audience.

Well, here’s good news if you’re one of those business owners.

If you can talk, you can write.

I got this saying from a writing blog years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the URL or the name of the blog.

You Don’t Need to Be Shakespeare

A common myth in writing is that you have to have your grammar just right and you have to have a big vocabulary or no one will read you. This may be true if you’re writing for a scholastic journal or you’re writing a novel. But you’re not. You’re writing a blog on the web.

The web is an interesting medium. It started out without any commercial elements. And while many businesses have joined the web, the internet has also evolved into a social, interactive environment. Today’s Internet users are not just passive consumers of information. Instead, they are active participants.

They create the information and communicate with other users through sites like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Also, many users have their own sites, which they update in their spare time. Most of these people are the average Joes and Janes. They are not English majors or budding authors. So, they are not going to grade your writing like your old English teacher.

The most important things in blogging are not your writing skill and vocabulary, but your expertise, experience, passion, and willingness to interact.

This blogger has over 30,000 subscribers and he definitely is not the most polished writer. His grammar is off in many places. He writes in a very conversational tone. And many of his sentences are clunky and wordy. But he does have something to say. He brings experience and expertise to the table and people listen to him.

I know a blogger from India who has hundreds of subscribers. English is not his first language so some of his blog posts have bad grammar. Yet he has a captive audience because of his passion and consistency.

Write the Way You Talk

As a business blogger, don’t be afraid to write the way you talk. As you write, pretend you’re actually communicating to a specific person that would fit your target audience. There are at least two benefits for doing this.

First, it makes you more personal. It shows that you’re a real person. This build trust and trust leads to sales. Too many businesses are guilty of stuffy, corporate speak. This type of writing makes those businesses seem cold and impersonal.

Second, it lowers your writing time. I believe that much of the time spent on writing is second guessing yourself and over analyzing your writing. However, if you write like you talk, you can write much more freely. And sure, it doesn’t hurt to reread what you’ve written and edit and rewrite as needed.