I have just been thinking about the process I use to aggregate and disseminate information digitally. I use a mixture of apps, which I know is not the most efficient but I like it. It comprises a few widgets in iGoogle, Google reader for RSS, Yahoo Pipes, delicious, Friendfeed and Twitter.
The reason though for this post struck me when I was reading my feeds in Google Reader or more to the point how I was reading them. Due to the amount of info I aggregate (its about 200 posts a day alone without forums) I was selecting which ones to read based on the title of the post! OK now I have said that, it seems obvious, but I bet you never thought that hard about the title of your post before because you have been focussing on content, tags etc. Suffice to say even the likes of Jeremiah Owyang or Chris Brogan get overlooked in my reader, if they haven’t wowed me with the title of their post. Moreover use some sharing tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed, depending on how content is shared, may only show the title of the post and a short URL link and no clue as to its origin. An example would be Google reader shared items when displayed in Friendfeed.
This reminded me of the email marketing consultancy we give to our clients who use our email marketing tools, Ackura MessageSender and PromoSender. That being, you can have the most fantastically designed HTML email that renders in all email clients perfectly but it will never get to do its job if the subject line it not enticing enough for the reader to open the email. The same goes for blog posts.
One of the fundamental questions that most of the delegates ask us at our social media workshops and seminars that we run at inblackandwhite, is “How do I increase traffic to my blog?.” What they really mean is how do I get people to read my stuff? I think we would all agree that traffic results from a number of actions but writing great, original content is up there in the top three, then going through the process of SEO, tagging etc. There are other actions of course however they are not central to this post, but assuming you have done all the hard work and got into my feed reader only to be ignored because you don’t stick out from the crowd with an enticing blog post title is like a 100-1 shot falling at the final fence when it is 20 lengths ahead.
Your blog post title could be the difference between success and failure!
