Have you ever noticed that while you are going through your RSS reader or reading the newspaper or may be accessing some social media sites like Digg, Reddit etc., your attention magically gets shifted to a particular post/article ? If you are one of those who haven’t noticed it ever then you must be thinking that Oh Yes!, the boy is right! What really entices you is mostly the headline or blog post title and that makes you read the whole story.

In this world of internet users, we know that the attention span of the readers is minuscule and thus it becomes even more important for bloggers to ensure that they should write quality articles with even more quality headlines/post titles. It may be quite possible that because of your headlines you may not be getting the kind of desired attention in the blogosphere even though you may have been producing some amazing content.

Infact, “The Killer Title” is not just about grabbing the attention of the readers there is more to it. In blogging, there are two things involved; Readers & Search engines. So, while writing the post title we have to ensure that it is not only the attention grabber for the readers but it should be attention grabber for search engines too!

What Makes a title - “The Killer Title” :

Now we know that we have two targets and we have to work on them to ensure that every article we publish should be an attention grabber of -

1. People &
2. Search engine.

How can we grab the attention of “the people” through post titles ?

1. 1000 Things I’ve learned about blogging.
2. Your popular stuff should go on mondays.
3. Do you show Appreciation to your favorite bloggers?

You’ll notice that all the three post titles have something catchy behind them, they make you think that what information is behind those post titles and thus make you read them too. Let’s look at the points which will help you write effective and catchy headlines -

1. Active voice makes it attractive -

WordPress 2.7 goes under fantabulous cosmetic change! This is an example of active voice where we are talking about what is going on at the moment and thus makes it more interesting for the people who want to stay ahead and follow the current news of the required subject.

2. Numbers always attract the stat junkies - Most of the people who are keen in grabbing lots of information , get excited as soon as they are presented with some facts or numbers. So, if you’ll have a list post or a number in front of the headline, then it will surely attract the attention of readers.

e.g. - 7 reasons to write a WordPress plugin, 83 beautiful WordPress themes.

3. Ask questions from the readers - If you’ll ask some relevant question from the readers in the headline, then it will surely attract their attention as it gives them a feeling that you are interested in their opinion and these kind of posts attract comments too.

e.g. - The title of this post itself is a question, How to make money from your blog site?

There are other ways through which one can attract readers’ attention when it comes to writing that killer title and I’m sure it would be great fun if you also contribute in it as that will not only help in generating some “killer ideas” but it will also help you in earning a link back from a future PR 8 blog site Yes, we are going to link back to you, if you submit some killer idea of writing a killer headline!

What? Wait! where are the ways to attract search engines attention through headlines ?

Don’t worry! We’ve kept them safe for our next blog post and we’ll share that information in next blog post, if you want feel free to subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feed and stay updated.

Thank you Darren for the idea of this post-

Darren Rowse - The blogging GOD! had recently done Killer Titles Group writing project and got huge amount of entries in it, it recieved 343 sumissions and many of the titles were awesome and here are some of the list of those titles which I liked the most !

1. 101 Top personal finance tips - Part 1!
2. Two blogspot tricks that can increase your traffic overnight!
3. Attn: Crazy People. I have a few quick questions.
4. Why twitter has as much depth as my fish tank ?

To be honest there are hundreds of wonderful posts out there and I’ve browsed most of them and I definitely see that lot of improvement is required for everyone of us as writing a killer headline and not following a particular pattern is also important.

Do you think about writing a killer title before writing the blog post or do you publish the article just because you have to? Killer headlines can surely make a lot of difference in bringing the traffic for the blog and I will always suggest that one should invest some time in writing the headline of the post.