[Update]
I’m changing the title on this post, because it was a good example of what I would consider to be a bad headline!Old title: Extra! Extra! Read All About It!! New title: Blog Post Titles Matter The server stats should give me an idea if this post is more popular now that it’s named more accurately, as I suspect it will be. Gotta practise what I preach, right?
[Original Post] Blogging is not news reporting. Blogging will not replace the traditional news media. But bloggers should still pay attention to the very real lessons that are to be learned from the traditional news media, particularly the print media.
When most people read a newspaper, they scan the pages for something that jumps out and catches their eye. There are two things that can reliably do this: an interesting picture, or an interesting headline.
Pictures – being worth a thousand words – are fairly self explanatory. They are visual, and pull the reader in.
Headlines don’t have that same quality, yet benefit from their status as an obvious label for the content that follows.
Readers are trained to scan headlines first, and this holds true more than you may realize when it comes to blogs. Many people subscribe to literally hundreds of blogs through RSS feeds. They can’t realistically read each and every post, so they scan. They scan the titles of the posts, or headlines, to be exact.
So, you must ask yourself: What do my headlines say?
(Of course, I’d do well to take my own advice… my last post was called “Ballmer and the Volcanoe”… what the hell is that?!)
Please note: I've moved my active blogging over to a new site, called Jason Clarke - Infinite Bass Line. I will leave this site up indefinitely, but if you're interested in my latest posts please consider visiting the new site.