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.