07 Apr Do You Think Gordon Brown Is a Stone-Cold Social Media Genius?
Posted at 06:52h
in
Blogging,
SEO
by Paul Sutton
So you’ve started reading this blog post. Why? Ask yourself that question – what drew you to want to read it? Was it the implication that you’ll learn something about social media? Are you a Labour party nut? Or are you anti-Brown? Your motivation may be one of these or it may be something entirely different, but the simple answer as to why you’re reading this post is the headline.
Having read the first paragraph, you might as well quit now. Seriously, the rest of this post is rubbish – it has nothing to do with Gordon Brown or politics in any way, shape or form. But thanks for visiting anyway, yeah? Cool. It’s just that it’s a post about the power of good blog titles – I could (and probably should) have called it ‘How to Write Great Blog Titles’, or ‘8 Fantastic Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog’ if I was being more overt. I’ll come back to relevancy in a bit, but in the meantime Mark Twain or Brian Solis I ain’t, so who am I to tell you what to do?
Gordon Brown: Doesn’t Write Any Blog Titles, Let Alone Good Ones
Anyway, if you’re still here (you must be mad after that second paragraph), the sole purpose of a title is to get potential readers to read the first line of the post. Or so said David Ogilvy in his modestly-titled copywriting bible ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’. And, like I say, who am I to argue? And if you’ve got this far, or even if you gave up when I said (in which case you’re not reading this – does a falling tree make a sound in the woods if there’s no-one there to hear it?), then this particular blog post headline did its job – it got you to (at least start to) read. Why?
The title ‘Do You Think Gordon Brown Is a Stone-Cold Social Media Genius?’ incorporates several elements that make blog headlines compelling. First, it’s topical. The UK election date was announced this week putting politics into the spotlight, so to mention Gordon Brown today will (probably) grab attention. It’s also controversial. Controversy is a technique that can generate strong opinion at first glance and encourage people not only to read your blog posts, but also to comment on them and debate issues. So what do you think – IS Gordon Brown a genius? Next up, the headline is personalised. I’m not sitting here writing this post to you personally (sorry, but it’s just the way of things), but because the title used the word ‘You’, you can’t help but feel personally involved, like it’s targeted directly at you. Right?
Another great tip for encouraging readers and responses is to ask a question. In this headline, I’m asking for an opinion. Combine that with the personalisation and you’ve got a title that talks directly to the reader and probes them for their own thoughts. This particular headline also uses a power word – a word that instantly triggers a response. In this instance, the power word is ‘Genius’. Used in conjunction with Gordon Brown, it elicits an emotional response, either good or bad. I’ve also used the phrase ‘stone-cold’ as a descriptor to add further emphasis to ‘genius’ as a power word. And finally, my headline uses a keyword – all important in SEO (though not the driver for this particular post) and in attracting the right crowd to your post. I’ve used ‘Social Media’ as my keyword phrase as I want people interested in blogging to read this and I hope that anyone scanning their RSS feed might be attracted by this. There’s a time and place for SEO and this blog post isn’t it, but keywords in titles (and preferably at the start of titles) are also extremely important for search algorithms. Just trust me on that, OK?
There are a few other tricks you can use that I simply couldn’t squeeze into one headline, no matter how contrived it might be. You could argue that the title I’ve used is humorous – as if Gordon Brown is a genius of any kind, let alone with social media! Humour is a very personal emotion, so a funny title can attract people in droves. Although a title that tries to be funny but isn’t will put people off in equal measure. Finally, headlines can communicate a benefit, which is why you get so many ‘How To…’ and ’10 Ways To…’ blog titles. Personally I find this a bit lazy and obvious, which is why I don’t use them very often, but they do undoubtedly work…
And this last method brings me (at last, you say) to my final point – relevancy. What my headline spectacularly fails to do is to summarise my blog post. It’s entirely irrelevant to the subject matter, which is normally a huge mistake. So when writing your headlines, no matter how many of the above tips you use, make sure the title is relevant to your post. Otherwise you’ll lose people after paragraph one – about where I told you that you might as well quit.
Speaking of which, are you still here?! Well you may as well leave a quick comment or tweet this post if you’ve made it to the end…
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