I’ve just updated our submissions page with the final batch of 77 submissions for the project. This brings us to a total of 343 entries.

Please head over and surf through some of the posts submitted – bookmark, comment, subscribe to and link up to those that you like the most.

The Winner Is…

This project has been generously sponsored by Logo Designer David Airey who has put up a $2000 logo design for one random participant. Thanks to David – I can’t wait to see the logo that you come up with for our winner.

I’ve just drawn the winner of this prize using a random number generator.

The prize goes to Mjuboy for their title Sacrificing Goats and Eating Brains – congratulations, I’ll email you with details of how to get your prize (update: Mjuboy’s thank you post is here).

Thanks again to everyone for participating – I hope more than just Mjuboy feels a winner and benefited from this project. To be notified of future Group Writing Projects and competitions at ProBlogger make sure you’re subscribed to our feed.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Killer Titles Project is Over – And the Winner Is…

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Day 3 of Killer Titles Project are Live

We’ve talked about the theory of it – so now it’s time to get a little more practical.

In the next couple of days I’m going to launch a group writing project that picks up the topic of blog titles – but before that (and to help us ‘warm up’ for the project) I thought it might be interesting to workshop a few reader posts as a community.

I just asked my Twitter followers if they had any old blog posts that they feel had good content but poor titles that we could do a community workshop on.

Here are five of the posts submitted:

1. My Sister Who Died at 10; Losing a Sibling
2. 45 Ways to Exploit Bored Teens for Online Marketing Good
3. Black Women and Preeclampsia
4. Poorer Individuals Less Likely to Survive
5. IM Charity & the Children’s Hospital

I had quite a few more posts submitted but decided to use these five randomly (although there are a few themes!) so that we could focus our energy on just five titles.

So what I’d like to invite you to do is to come up with alternate titles for these posts. Don’t just rush it – ‘craft’ the titles using some of the principles we discussed in the theory we discussed earlier. Feel free to come up with titles for each one or just one of them – but please say which one you’re reworking (use the numbers).

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Show Off Your Title Creation Skills – Rework These Post Headlines

This tool is one that Google offer their advertisers (looking to work out what keywords to target on Google) but is also useful for bloggers wanting to research how many people are searching for certain keywords. It will also give you information about how many potential advertisers there might be on a topic also.

There are other tools that do similar things and many ways that you can use the AdWords Keyword Tool but let me show you a couple:

1. Using AdWords Keyword Tool to Chose a BLOG Topic

Lets just say I was starting a new blog and am having trouble choosing between topics or want to research specific keywords to use in my blog’s title and or domain.

I’ve narrowed down my interest to ipod accessories but am tossing up whether I should narrow my niche even further and just have a blog about ipod cases.

In the AdWord Keyword Tool I would simply enter in both terms and ask for keyword ideas. The tool will give me this (click to enlarge):

What we’re seeing above is a number of things. Firstly the Green bars under ‘advertiser competition’ show us that in the AdWords system there is a lot of advertisers competing for these keywords. This gives me an indication that if I were to use AdSense there would be a healthy amount of advertisements to serve to my blog.

In the ‘search volume’ columns we get an indication approximate search numbers for the term per month in Google. While the numbers are unlikely to be perfect they do show that ‘ipod accessories’ gets searched for on Google more than ‘ipod cases’.

At this point in my topic selection process I’d probably also have a look at Google Trends for the two terms:

Here we see the same information (in terms of which term is more popular) but also see whether the topics are trending up or down and whether they have seasonal spikes (all good to know when choosing a topic for a blog).

2. Using AdWord Keyword Tool to Choose a POST Title

In a similar way I regularly use the AdWords Keyword Tool to help me form post titles that have potential to bring in search engine traffic.

Lets say that I’m writing a post on my photography site rating my favorite digital cameras. I’ve written my post and am going to call the post ‘Top Digital Cameras’.

Before I hit publish I decide to go to the AdWords Keyword Tool and type in ‘top digital cameras’ and ‘best digital cameras’.

What this shows me is that ‘top digital cameras’ only gets a third as many searches on Google as ‘best digital cameras’. Also, it shows me that ‘best digital camera’ (no plural) gets even more searches than both terms.

This gives me some clues as to what to title my post and what keywords to use throughout my article if I want to optimize it for a term with the most search traffic that I can possibly get.

If I were to look further down the results page for these terms I would also see other suggested search terms and how many searches there are in Google for them. This not only gives me ideas on what keywords to use in my current posts title – but also might give me ideas for future posts to blog about.

A variation on this is to use another helpful feature in the AdWords Keyword Tool – one that lets you submit text and get suggested keywords from it.

Here’s how to do it. Say you’ve already written a blog post and you’re wanting to choose a title for it. Simply choose the ‘Website content’ option and then the ‘enter your own text in the box below’ option. Then copy and paste the text from your post into the field provided and hit ‘Get keyword ideas’.

The tool will then scan the text suggest keywords that match it – highlighting those which have the most searches. You then can use these keywords as the basis for your post title.

Will this Really Have an Impact?

It is worth stating that using the AdWord Keyword Tool to help you choose keywords for your blog will have different impacts upon different blogs – depending upon how well they already rank on Google.

If your blog is new you might not notice much difference in the traffic to your blog no matter what keywords you use (simply because your blog is yet to build a ranking in Google yet) – however in time, as your blog accumulates links from other blogs and sites, it will certainly pay off. This is particularly true if you use the keywords not only in your blog post but the title (which has real power with Google particularly).

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

AdWords Keyword Tool How to Use it to Hone Post Titles and Choose Blog Topics

Those few words at the beginning of your blog post can be the difference between the post being read and spread like a virus through the web like a wild fire and it languishing in your archives, barely noticed.

This month we’ve been talking about how to ‘craft’ blog posts and are looking at key moments in the writing of blog posts that it is important to pause and put a little extra effort into.

While there will usually only be a handful of words in your post title – they are the most powerful words that you’ll write because for most of your readers the decision as to whether to read the rest of your post rests upon them.

Why Blog Post Titles Matter

Blog post titles appear in:

• Search engine results
• RSS feeds
• Links from other bloggers
• Social media sites
• On your archive pages (depending upon how you format them)

In each of these occassions the title can be the only thing that people see and the sole thing that people make the decision to visit your post on. Write a boring, complicated or confusing title and it doesn’t matter what you’ve written in the post – very few people will ever read it.

What should a Good Blog Post Title Do?

There are many techniques that copywriters use in crafting titles or headings both online and offline – but there’s generally one common goal behind them all. It can be summed up in the words of David Ogilvy who in Oglivy on Advertising (a great copywriting book) again and again echoes the refrain that:

“the purpose of a title is to get potential readers to read the first line of your content.”

This is one of the lessons that has helped me the most in my own blogging and I’ve seen it’s power again and again.

Write a captivating and intruiging title and you’ll draw people into reading it every time.

How to Craft a Blog Post Title – 8 Tips

How do you craft a blog post title that get people to read your blog posts opening lines?
There are many techniques for crafting blog post titles that will draw readers into them. Below I’ll outline a few (you won’t be able to do all of them in every single post).

Before I share them – let me give one universal tip – Don’t Rush – this is the main point of this whole series on crafting content. If there’s nothing else you come away from today – take away that if you rush your titles you could well be wasting the time that you invest into your actual posts. Invest time into your posts, it’s something that will pay off!

Now that we’re taking our time – here are 8 tips that I use in the creation of blog post titles. Note: you’d not be likely to use all of them in the one post (although for fun I did my best to get quite a few of them into the image title above). Different techniques will work better in different situations.

1. Communicate a Benefit

This is SO IMPORTANT. If a potential reader comes across your post in Google search results or your RSS feed or on a site like Digg and they see a title that promises to meet a need they have – they’ll click that link on almost every occassion. Identify a need in of potential readers (we talked about this in yesterdays post) and communicate that your post will solve this problem or need in your title. This is why posts with titles like ‘How to Hold a Digital Camera’ and ’10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits’ (LINKSSSSSSS) have driven hundreds of thousands of readers to my photography blog in the last year. They are not ‘clever’ or ‘cryptic’ titles – they simply SCREAM at those that see them what they’ll get if they visit the post. These titles don’t draw everyone that see’s them to them, but they’ll certainly draw in people with the needs that you’re aiming the post at.

2. Create Controversy or Debate

Another technique that can be very good at drawing people into a post is to set the scene for controversy, debate or a strong opinion. You need to be willing to back these types of titles up with posts that reflect the title – but controversy is one of those things that tends to pique people’s interest. Keep in mind that when you create controversy you’ll attract strong reactions in people.

3. Ask a Question

When you ask a question those who read it are wired to respond (or to see what the response is). I find that questions at post titles can be very popular at not only drawing in readers – but particularly effective at getting readers to leave comments – particularly if the comment directs a question AT the reader (ie use the word YOU in the question) rather than just being a random question. I’ll write more on personalizing titles below.

4. Personalize Titles

When you write blog posts you are potentially writing to vast audiences of many thousands of readers – however readers can feel like the post is laser targetted in on their own specific situation, particularly if you personalize the language that you’re using. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply to use the word ‘you’ in your posts. I wrote a little about this in First Person Blogging about ‘You’ but mainly talked about using the word ‘you’ in the post itself but in the title of your posts it can have an even bigger impact. Example – 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky.

5. Use Keywords

Keywords in titles are good for two main reasons:

• Firstly they grab the attention of readers who are scanning content – I noticed this recently when I was in a buying mode looking to get an iPhone. Anytime any post in my RSS feeder had the word ‘iPhone’ it was like a flashing light and attracted my attention to it. I could hardly help it but because I was on the look out for information to help me with that purchase the keyword was a great attention grabber.
• Secondly – keywords are important for the long tail life of your blog post as they tell search engines what your blog post is about and will help it to rank highly for those words. Search engines pay particular attention to titles to assertain what a web page is about – particularly if you use the words in your page ‘title tags’ as well (read more on title tags and SEO).

So use keywords that relate to your post in your titles. This is a particularly useful tip if you write about products, people or companies as these types of ‘names’ are some of the most searched for terms on the web.

One more tip for keywords – if you can include them at the start of your title they can have more impact with SEO than if you include them at the end of a title (particularly if the title is long).

6. Use Power Words

Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers and it can be well worth your while to find out what they are.

It’s difficult to compile a list of these ‘power words’ but a few that I’ve found that can work (although read my disclaimer below):

• Free – there’s something about the idea of getting something for nothing that triggers a response in most of us.
• Stunning – I use words like ‘stunning’ on my photography blog a lot. These words are ‘big claim’ words that draw people into the post to see if it matches up (see below for more on ‘big claims’)
• Discover – everyone likes to make discoveries. Another ther related word is ‘revealed’.
• Secrets – this triggers a response because it promises to show you something you don’t yet know. Similarly – you could use ‘Little Known Ways to…’ as an alternative to ‘secrets’.
• Easy – similarly to ‘free’ – we all like ‘easy’ don’t we? – also use ‘quick’. Better still – what about ‘quick and easy’?

Disclaimer – power words can be very beneficial, however they can also trigger negative reactions. Some people get skeptical when they see titles with these types of words and will resist clicking them – others will click them but get angry if the post itself doesn’t live up to the title. Proceed with caution.

7. Big Claims and Promises

I’ve mentioned this technique already but it does deserve a little further exploration as it is a definite way to draw people into a post. Making a bit claim or promise really extends upon my first technique – ‘Communicate a Benefit’ – but takes it to a place where the benefit being shared in the title just cannot be ignored.

These sorts of ‘big claims’ make guarantees that even people without a real need in your topic will want to check out.

The only problem with big claim posts is that if you can’t actually back them up with the post itself, you run the risk of putting readers offside.

8. Humor Titles

The humorous title is yet another technique that can be very effective at drawing readers into you blog – that is IF you pull it off.

The risk with humorous posts is that they can also fall flat on their faces and leave you with a post title that not only fails to draw loyal readers in but which is not optimized well for search engines (unless you manage to incorporate some keywords).

Two More Quick Tips on Writing Blog Posts:

Keep it short – while it is possible to actually grab people’s attention with a very long title (the length itself can draw people to it) – in most cases you’ll want to keep it simple and easy to digest. This is good for readers but also search engines (they will only show 65 or so characters so if you go too long your full title doesn’t appear in search results).
Don’t use Periods (full stops) – this one might just be my personal preference and open for debate (although I’ve seen a number of copywriters talk about it) but using full stops or ‘periods’ at the end of titles can stop the flow of your readers. It’s not a big one but something that could have an impact.

Further Reader on Blog Post Titles:

• Andy Beal wrote a thought provoking post – How to Optimize Blog Post Titles – in which he explores two audiences of blog posts and how he suggests you optimize titles for each at different life stages of a post.
• Brian Clark has written some fantastics posts on Blog Post Titles in his series Magnetic Headlines. It includes some title templates that are worth experimenting with.

What have you learned about writing blog post titles? Do you use some of the above approaches or have you found other techniques to work for you?

Read the Full Series

This post is part of a series on how to craft blog posts. It will be all the more powerful if taken in context of the full series which looks at 10 points in the posting process to pause and put extra effort. Start reading this series here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers Into Your Blog