Hi there reader. Welcome (back).
In this post I want to talk about the title of a blog post.
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the Internet that states (ad nauseum) that the blog post title has to be catchy, compelling & with a “sense of urgency“. Otherwise you might as well not write a post at all. They also state that having numbers in the title is a winner. (For example, I bet the “5 ways..” in the title of this blog was a like magnet…and, I have to apologise, I used it just for that reason.)
(Note – I updated the title to include the word “STUPENDOUSLY” as an example a ludicrous use of hyperbole in a blog post title.)
I find a lot of these techniques to be a bit “dishonest”. Oh sure, a lot of the blogs posts that have titles that have a number in them (“6 incredible ways to increase your readership”, or “15 secrets that we will never tell you”) do tend to deliver, but I hate the fact that this technique has to be used.
Personally, I don’t write my blog posts to be read. I know, that sounds weird. Certainly, if I get people actually taking the time to read it, then that is fantastic, but it is not the reason I write.
I write to get my own thoughts about technology and related subjects “on paper”. I helps me know what I know.
If you look at a thesis written for a PhD, do they ever have a number in them that is intended to draw in the reader? (For example, should a thesis titled “Constraining Global Biogenic Emissions and Exploring Source Contributions to Tropospheric Ozone: Modeling Applications” be better off as “12 Ways to Show how CO2 contributes to Ozone“? Sure, it’s a simple title that tells you, more or less, what’s it’s about. You do get the feeling of “Wow – I’m going to read that to find out what these 12 ways are”, but it sort of lowers the expectation of the thesis.
Now, I’m not saying that blog posts should have such lengthy titles, (for an example of a model for creating such titles, see the comic at the end of this post), but I just want to point out that some blog posts are written to merely “capture” something – a person’s opinion, or a their understanding of something, or to provide knowledge on something. They don’t necessarily have to be read by fifty thousand people within 6 hours of being published. Instead they are available for future discovery (for example, a person may do a search using one of their favourite search engines), or are shared by a small (global) group of people with an interest in that particular subject (a “community of interest”).
Having said that, a good title does help explain what the post is about, (and I intend to go back over my previous posts to make them a little bit more helpful.)
And here’s that comic I mentioned…
Click on the image to see more great “PhD” comics
Heh. Yep, that’s pretty much why I write too. Essentially as a bit of a way to help me think about stuff. Sometimes I’m trying to be entertaining or informative at the same time, but generally I just start writing and if I think I’ve got to the point where it’s worth hitting publish, then I do. In latter years I’ve had that feeling less and less.
These days I think most blog posts *about blogging* are written by marketeers for marketeers, not by thinkers for thinkers, pundits for pundits, analysts for analysts, or even entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs…
Ditto posts/tweets/etc *about* Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc. Marketeers talk about this stuff. For the most part, the rest of us just do it. And every now and then we’ll complain about it 😉
There are of course exceptions. IIRC My last two posts were *both* about social networking, were definitely not for marketeers, and I think I wrote them mainly because, well, I felt like I should probably blog about something 😉
I’m also sure it’s a very different story within Intranet style blogging.
Random factoid: a buddy of mine (Phil Pearson) wrote the first cross topic blog aggregator (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/TopicExchange). Hoping to catch him down in Christchurch on his xmas trip before he gets on a plane back to the Valley….
Hey there Seth
Thanks for your comment, and also the info you gave.
I agree with you what you have said totally! There is so many “blogging” blog posts out that, essentially, rehash the same tips, ideas, etc. When I first started blogging, I just wrote (the same as you). Then…I decided to work out what I could do to improve my blogging. There were quite a few interesting blog posts that offered oodles of tips. However I quickly came to realise that the goal was just how to get as many hits as possible. These posts, full of improvement tips, didn’t seem to actually consider the possibility that you weren’t writing just to get hits.
At that stage I stopped paying too much attention toi what they said, and returned to why I started writing.
And…as you mentioned, intranet blogging does serve a different purpose.
Oh and further on the subject of headlines & titles, and with my respect to my comment on another of your posts about the [INFOGRAPHIC] “tag” I kept seeing in blog titles from mashable et al this year, it’s not like the issues with them are something new to social media 😉 See for instance my thoughts on sub-editors in section 5 of this stupidly long blog post: http://sethop.com/2010/06/21/democracy-its-complicated/ (if you manage to read all of if you’ll understand why I so rarely get around to hitting publish these days ;-))
Thanks Seth
I read your blog post (again – looked at it yesterday also), and it is an excellent example of what I am talking about…sure, according to the blog post “rules” your post broke pretty much all of them, but then you wrote because you wanted to get your thoughts done “on paper”. Publishing it just helped ratify those thoughts as well as making it available for feedback from others (which I see that you got). Discussion, or debate, is always a valuable thing. It helps further clarify (both to yourself, and others) what you really think about a subject.
Thanks for a great comment!