Why Your Post Titles Are More Important Than Ever

Yesterday, influential blogger Louis Gray announced on FriendFeed that he wanted recommendations for Tech blogs, so that he could pick five of them to be featured on his blog.

I immediately thought this could be a great way to get more people discover my blog and potentially subscribe.

A couple of hours later, he wrote the following:

“All of the above have been added to Google Reader, via Toluu. See my activity here: http://www.toluu.com/louisgray”

When I headed over, he had indeed added my blog to his list. A list with more than a thousand feeds.

I immediately visualized Louis’ Google Reader with all those feed titles. He (as me and everyone else) must scan by title.

Of course this is not news. Problogger has a list of things to take into consideration to make better titles.

But you could think outside blogging, and think Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed… the list goes on and on. To have people sample your content, your title has to immediately catch your audience’s attention, specially with the amount of information that’s been thrown at us. People are following thousands of users in Twitter and thousands of feeds on their readers. Your title has to really stand out if you want to have any chance to have the user click on it.

Today, fellow Twitterer and Blogger Hutch Carpenter hit the motherload with his post “How To Tweet Your Way Out of a Job“. The title is short, sweet and interesting. The post is also short, but just eye-opening.

Starting today I’m watching my Twitter, Blog and FriendFeed titles a little closer. It might mean the difference between getting noticed or being lost in a sea of a thousand feeds.

Tagged as: copyediting, importance, titles