Recent Blog Entries
Entry titles: think about them
Written by Tyme White on September 27, 2006
Here’s the scenario. Tyme’s going through her RSS feeds, sees the entry title “Digging for the Truth podcast joins 9rules!”. Tyme reads this and thinks “whaaa?”, clicks on the link, browser opens up. The entry starts off with:
Ha, now that I got your attention…
Yes, you have my attention all right. Congratulations, you now have an irritated reader. Do you think I’m going to browse your site? Finish reading the article? Subscribe to your site? No. I’m not, but I’ll remember the site so if I forget and click to the site again, I will not be there long.
Another common one is a link that says something like Janet Jackson’s music, and when the person clicks on the link the reader is taken to a web site where the writer mentioned Janet’s music in the last paragraph of the 1000 word entry.
Curious, if you do this, who are you thinking of? Yourself and the temporary traffic or the reader’s experience? I know, you’re going to say “Tyme, you’re being too harsh! Lighten up!”. Um, no…going to tell you why.
1. Open a new tab in your browser.
2. Go to 9rules
3. On the left hand side what do you see? Remember that.
4. Now, click on any community.
5. Scroll down to the site listings. What do you see?
Yes, links. 9rules is made up of a lot of links because we do not show full content here. Can you imagine what our site would look like with that kind of foolishness? We’re trying to get people to visit 9rules member sites, not tick them off. More importantly, when people are ticked off, they do not email Scrivs or Mike, they email Tyme. Can you imagine how exponentially irked I would be?
So give some consideration to your titles and links. Deceiving (I know, you call it having fun) your readers is a risk most blogs can’t afford to take. Keep in mind, some blogs pull this off wonderfully and you can tell because the readers are commenting and interacting with the writer. If you’re doing this and the tumbleweeds are blowing on your site…this might be why.
September 27th, 2006 at 9:33 am
And let’s not forget the titles in the title tag, itself. Back in the day, folks used to throw all kinds of cutesy punctuation into their title tag. I did too. Because for some reason, we thought it looked cool to have ::::—–title—–:::: in the browser bar instead of just text.
Yes, we WERE loopy.
Now, I’ve seen this cropping up again, and from a syndication, “blog this,” del.icio.us, digg perspective, the title tag has become just as important as the title, itself. These services are a critical component of reaching your audience, as well.
September 27th, 2006 at 11:55 am
My titles aren’t always exactly black/white about what the article is about. I can’t do it!
September 27th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Your titles are fine. Your titles are fun, not misleading. Like this one, and this one, and particularly this one.
Guess I’m having a linking good time.
September 27th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Can everyone please apply these principles to everything they do? I’m talking about post titles, browser titles, link text, alt tags, photo captions, etc. I really don’t understand why it’s fun for anyone to make things harder for their readers.
/rant
Thanks Tyme, you managed to hit on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Yeah, I don’t like deceptive post titles. Basically, if I am writing about my day, I make a title that realates to a day like “Rain, rain, go away.” or “Lost in Calgary”.
September 27th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Excellent! Very well observed. A headline should always be about the content, and should always be written, naturally enough, with an eye on enticing readers in - but that’s most definitely not the same as duping them. That kind of behaviour can only have short-term immediate gain and ead to resentment and the word getting word round that you’re, well, a bit of a tosser all told. x
September 27th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Yeah.. I surely agree upon titles.
These days I get to read lots of blogging tips from 9rules. Keep going.. I want to read more such stuff
September 27th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Yeah but I wonder, is the title “A bit of sunshine in the rain” good for this post?
September 28th, 2006 at 2:07 am
Creating copy which works for your audience and handlines that grab them to match are both part of the journo/webloggers arts. I wrote a piece once titled “Headlines Create Traffic Shock: 29 Dead”. The piece went on to bitch about people and their stupidity in reacting to headlines and advertising ploys. The piece ended “Meanwhile some 29 persons have died of hunger whilst this post was written”, a regular sign off on my site which carries a banner advertisement about poverty related death and often focuses on the issues.
September 28th, 2006 at 10:07 am
News outlets do this all the time. They know shocking headlines help sell papers or magazines or boost their TV/Web ratings, even if the title actually has little to do with the actual news. It takes time and fine-tuned BS filters to read between the lines. Of course I don’t exactly approve of it, but it is not too hard to see where this practice comes from.
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:14 am
[...] Want to know where some of the messed up entry titles come from? Entries like my example above. [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
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October 2nd, 2006 at 2:43 pm
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October 2nd, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Neither do I but blogging is a revolution. We must respect that.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:52 pm
[...] Want to know where some of the messed up entry titles come from? Entries like my example above. [...]