Remington Begg
Congratulations! You just invested almost two hours writing a remarkable blog post for your company and it's going to convert website visitors into leads like a magical marketing machine. You click post and wait for the flood of people that the post is going to attract. One hour goes by, nothing. One day goes by, three readers. One week goes by, seven readers. These are not the results you had hoped for! How could this amazing blog post fail?
Chances are the blog title failed to grab the reader's attention.
Spend More Time on Headlines
A common blogging mistake is spending all your time crafting a fantastic post, you then spend only a couple minutes writing the title. The blog title is one of the most important parts of your post. Neglect it, and even the most brilliant blog posts will fall face first and be lost to blog obscurity.
Research from Copyblogger tells us eight out of ten people will read your blog title. Only two out of ten will click through and read the rest of your content. Analytics like this 80/20 rule tells us that headlines are often the do-or-die mechanism for each blog post.
Now that we know the importance of blog titles, how do we know how much time to spend crafting one that captures and intrigues readers?
According to some of the best bloggers and copywriters around, you should spend at least half your time writing and rewriting your attention-grabbing, eye-popping, Earth-shattering blog titles. So if you have a blog post you really want people to read, (isn't that all of them?!) then you should completely obsess over the quality of the title.
I will often write at least ten titles for every blog post. I'll sit there and stare at them, read them out loud, and eventually drop the ones that don't grab and intrigue. This process usually takes around 30-40 minutes.
What the Experts Say
Advertising legend David Ogilvy knew the power of headlines and titles. He knew that the title literally determined whether the advertisement, or in our case the blog post, would get read or not. He famously rewrote a Rolls Royce ad headline 104 times until the right one appeared.
Copywriting extraordinaire Gene Schwartz has been known to spend an entire week on the first fifty words of sales copy—the title/headline and opening paragraph. That is an extreme example and blog writers often can't dedicate that much time to title creation, but it illustrates just how important an attention grabbing title is.
Your business blog should have strategy and purpose behind each blog post. With inbound marketing that purpose should be to create content that attracts visitors and pulls them into your marketing funnel. If your blog titles don't perform, then you are missing out on countless potential customers and revenue. Doesn't this inspire you to spend a little more time writing better titles? It does me!
Start a Routine
Make writing your blog titles just as important as the actual body copy of your post, not an after-thought. If it takes you an extra 30-minutes to write a juicy title then that's how long it takes. If it takes an hour, then it takes an hour. Add this new process to your blog writing routine so that it becomes as natural as riding a bike. Do this and you'll begin to see new users eager to read your content, all because you took the time to capture people's attention.
How do you craft an intriguing title? I'm glad you asked! Check out this blog that covers writing attention-grabbing titles. You can also download our free Headline Swipe File below to help stir your creative juices. Good luck and be sure to take the time to make those blog titles rock!
