Social Blogging Headlines - You Only Have 7 Seconds

Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 23 of February , 2008 at 8:07 am

“I’ve found headlines with numbers tend to produce more clicks, and longer headlines tend to produce less. Also my recent post titled “Weekend Fight & A Birthday Party” did well, I can only assume it’s due to curiosity. ‘What was the fight about?’”
Michelle MacPhearson
Social Marketing

Twenty years ago, the top direct marketers told you that your headline only had 7 seconds to capture a person’s attention. Today, in the internet social marketing age, you probably have half that time to attract a reader. Let’s say you’ve got 4 seconds to pull in your targeted social networker. How do you do that?

A few social blogging headline tips:

• Good titles are direct. They tell the reader exactly what benefit they’ll get from reading your blog post.
• Or - good titles arouse curiousity. You’ve hit the mark if you can get your reader to say, “Heck! What is THIS all about?” They have to read your post to find out.
• Better yet - really good titles do both.
• A specific number adds credibility to your title.
• Use strong action verbs to help spark an interest that gets the reader to read your blog post
• Don’t forget your SEO benefits. Your primary keyword needs to be in the title - the earlier, the better.
• Your post itself must have insightful, useful, valuable information. If you trick a social networker into wasting their time reading drivel, you have lost them forever.

If you do these things in every blog title you write, then you will write titles that get people to read your blog posts. To make that easier on yourself, focus on exactly who your target audience is. Then use a title structure to more effectively rivet social networker attention.

When writing a title, even if you don’t care about the SEO benefits, you should always have your keyword list open and visible. Those keywords are hot buttons for your targeted social blogging market. Use 1 or 2 of these keywords in your title to help pull your reader into your post..

A simple way to ensure that you get the social blogging keyword right up front and that you write a good title is to make the keyword your first word, followed by a colon. Then write a short title that follows the other principles.

A little practice can get you a big payoff. Get out your keyword list. Go to your MySpace page and click through some of the profiles. Notice 2 things: the line under the person’s name (on the left) and the first line of the “blurb” (on the right). These are critical titles - which most people waste. You know you want to create a magnet profile, so use your social blogging keyword list to improve each title to do that.

The more you practice, the more effective your own blog headlines will be.

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Category: Myspace, Social Blogging, Social Networking

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