Jan 9, 2014 / Traffic & Growth

Attracting Traffic: Tips for Writing Great Blog Post Titles

You’ve been working hard on your blog: you put thought and effort into your About page, your site title and tagline, and you’ve even picked a funky blog name. You sweat your photography. You read and re-read your drafts to make sure they’re just so.

With over 1.4 million posts published on WordPress.com every day, how do you make sure your work stands out in the crowd? Crafting strong post titles is one way to snag reader attention, pique interest, attract followers, and earn repeat visits. Here’s a few ideas to think about as your write titles for your posts.

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There are plenty of posts like What Game of Thrones Taught me About Modern Society or Everything I know about Marriage, I Learned from Homer Simpson in the world today.

How many listicles have you seen recently? You know what I’m talking about: 10 Signs Millennials Will Ruin the World, or 15 Ways to Tell if You Really Are a Hipster. Sure, these types of headlines have become commonplace on the web and we too enjoy a funny listicle now and again. If you want your work to stand out from the crowd, you might want to rethink these types of constructions, unless you feel you’ve got a piece that transcends the genre. And in that case, we can’t wait to read it.

Study the masters

Chances are, there’s title inspiration and guidance in the blogs and magazine articles you’re already reading. Are there a few sites or magazines that you really like? Study their titles. Consider what it is about these titles that draws you in.

What captured your attention? What tickled your curiosity? Try emulating your favorite authors when you write post titles. Me? I admire Maria Popova‘s title writing style over at Brain Pickings. Never trite, always enticing, Maria’s posts always end up in my Instapaper account for later brain feeding. Here’s a few Brain Pickings post titles that caught my attention:

Lead with the end in mind

If you’re writing to educate, be it to share a personal anecdote or offer hard-won advice, it’s good to ask yourself: What’s the most important thing I want my reader to remember from reading this post? Crafting the answer into a post title automatically reinforces your most important point for the reader, making sure your message not only gets heard, but remembered.

Try creating intrigue or using the element of surprise with titles by alluding to something readers can only see or learn by reading the post. Consider Maria Popova’s headline above, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Little-Known, Gorgeous Art. Right away, I’m surprised — One of my favorite authors — Bilbo Baggins‘ daddy no less — was not only a writer, but also an artist? This piece of new information makes me want to follow that link and find out about Tolkien’s works of art.

BONUS: How do Google, Twitter, and Facebook see it?

Your post’s title automatically becomes your post’s slug, which is part of the permanent link or URL to your post.

If your post title is fairly long, (over six or seven words) consider editing your slug to remove words such as “to,” “from,” “our,” “this,” “that,” etc., that don’t specifically relate to the post’s topic, for speedier search engine parsing. For example, this post’s slug would have been:

/attracting-traffic-tips-for-writing-great-blog-post-titles

I shortened the slug to the following to put the emphasis on the main idea: writing great post titles.

/writing-great-post-titles

If you’ve got your blog automatically connected to push and tweet posts to Facebook and Twitter, post titles are what gets sent out as a default via Publicize, so it’s important to consider how your post’s title might be perceived when it appears on your social networks.

As you write your piece, you may also want to think about the words readers will use to search for your post and ensure those words get a place in the title.

And now, over to you

Writing enticing titles is not only an art form, it takes a bit of practice. In your blogging experience, what have you found most effective when it comes to blog post titles? Share your tips with the class in the comments.

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  3. I am new here and so perhaps I am a dim-whit on these matters. However, I don’t quite get why attracting traffic is the be-all end-all. Perhaps someone can explain it to me? I am looking for people with common interests, which can be hard to find when one limits one’s self to a few mile radius from home. Since I am disabled and have not worked since Disney World terminated me while I was on medical leave, online seemed like a good spot to start looking for what I am looking for since I don’t trust my eyesight enough to drive to other areas where my kind of folks might congregate.

    Perhaps this is a good place to ask the question foremost in my mind now. What is your primary motive for coming to a blog site? Is it worth it to you to stay if you are not getting high-volume traffic? If I found the right crowd to fall into, I am in the right place. If it is not here, I can just move on since I have nothing to lose right now. Will it break your heart if you don’t get a bunch of followers? I am just wondering since I really haven’t formed a profile of who the typical person writing here.

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    1. Hi @Hostess — you raise a great point. Not everyone blogs to attract traffic. Many many people blog for the fun of it and to make connections with like-minded folks interested in the same things online.

      We tend to find that Daily Post readers are interested in how to attract traffic, and so we try our best to share what we’ve learned there. Even if you’re not blogging to get traffic, it’s fun to reconsider post titles.

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  4. Thank you for the post! This is my New Years resolutions so only just starting… Hoping what I’m writing will attract and inspire readers.

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  8. Great ideas.
    But what about who writes in portuguese or portuguese from Brasil? There Blogspot is the well know plataform. So as I write in portuguese – because we should do it and do not only in english – the interaction wtion other people that speaks portuguese is not very much. I think WordPress should stimulate that kind of interactions, between diferent languagues.
    At long last, the tips and prompts are being stupendous.

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  11. Great Post and Very Helpful. Just like in Brand Management and Marketing , Company Taglines should ideally be less than Six Words . Beyond that, it will be difficult to recall, or say even read from a moving vehicle .

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  13. Thanks for your help I think I tried to bite off more than I can chew creating a blog for severely disabled people in the workforce showing them my experiences and how I made it but I’m struggling to meld the two together well. I also wanted to educate others about how desperatly most disabled people want jobs but don’t get them to show there are untapped greatness and new thinkers all over the world that need a chance

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  16. I am a new blogger too (http://tiddlybitsteph.wordpress.com/) , thanks for the tips on titles, do you have any general ideas on how to gain followers? I have mainly been doing wedding blogs but am going to get into cooking as well. I will check out the community pool to see if anyone has general feedback, thanks for that tip as well!

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