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Why Titles Are Important
Titles are so important! They are the front door! People use your title to judge if your information is worth their time to read.
The title draws them in.
Even if your article and information are the best things in the world people will not read it if your title is trash.
You will get nowhere if you cannot get people interested in or help them see the value in what you put out there.
You have to promote what you are putting out there to get that click. You promote with the title.
The title is the first impression.
Early Titles
Let’s take a quick look at some of my first blog post titles:
Tips for Introducing Solids
Schedule for a Ten Month Old
How to Survive a Teething Baby
The Top 16 Items You Need for a Newborn
My Top 11 Favorite Baby Items
These titles aren’t great. They do explain what you are going to read about, but they do not make you excited to read them.
You aren’t on the edge of your seat excited to jump straight to the post to see what that title is all about.
The early titles are not exciting. They are not interesting.
The earlier titles were simple and to the point. The idea was to hit on the keywords for SEO. I thought words like baby, newborn, and teething were good words to go after. Do you realize how much competition these words have? Long-tail keywords…look it up.
All of these five posts came from my first-month of blogging. They are rough, but they were a stepping stone along the way.
Recent Titles
Now let’s take a look at some of the blog post titles I have recently published after 6 months of blogging.
How to Have a Successful First Camping Trip with a Toddler
How to Get Your Toddler to Go from Frustrated to Babbling to Talking
Gently Encourage Your 18 Month Old to Tackle These Milestones
10 Shocking Things You Need to Know About Starting Daycare
How Much Money Do You Save By Making Foods from Scratch?
The more recent titles bring you in. They are the titles you see on Pinterest and can’t help but click. These newer titles are specific. They paint you a small picture of what you are going to read.
The titles can also pull emotion out of you. Check out some of those words, shocking, gently, frustrated. Those words come with feelings.
Let’s talk a bit about how over time I improved my blog posts title.
Practice
Some skills take practice and time. You will get better the longer you do something. Somehow, someway it always happens.
I recommend that for every post you make a list of 20 titles. This may sound crazy, but the more you have to come up with the more creative you will get. Challenge yourself and push yourself to make a list of 20 titles.
When you find your title is getting better and better try switching out a word for a stronger synonym or adding a descriptive word. For example, take the word “good” and swap it with “amazing”. You could take the phrase “7 Baby Tips” and change it to “7 Useful Baby Tips”
You will be impressed by what you can come up with.
Just keep on practicing!
Scroll through Pinterest and see what you can’t help but click on. What makes you interested in that pin title? What is sucking you in?
Do the same thing if you are reading an article.
While reading the article are there any posts linked within the article that are related? Do you finish reading the article you are currently on or do you jump over to the other article? What is drawing you in?
If you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of posts that means their titles are working! Take inspiration from what they are doing!
CoSchedule
The free version of CoScheduler with Headline Studio is all you need. You are limited on your usage, but can make it work. Once I run out of headline scores I wait until I get more. No problem! I am currently able to get 25 uses a day.
coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
I didn’t take a course, read an e-book, or pay for any software. You don’t have to pay money to gain skills.
There are plenty of resources available that you can try. Find one or two that work for you and go with them.
What Makes a Title Good?
- Attention-Grabbing
- Emotional
- Powerful
- Specific
- Irresistible
- Not Fake, No Misleading, Not Clickbait
How to Improve Titles
Let’s start with my first poorly written title.
Tips for Introducing Solids 41
The 41 is the score CoSchedule have me.
Now I am quickly going to throw out a few better versions.
8 Tips for Introducing Solids to Your Baby 64
8 Practical Tips for Introducing Solids to Your Baby 67
How to Make Introducing Solids a Smooth Transition for Your Baby 70
Create the Perfect Environment for Introducing Your Baby to Solids 78
I am so embarrassed I published my article with a title that had a score of 41! You can tell I wasn’t using the CoSchedule with the Headliner Studio back then!
Now, look at my better version of that title. They are in the order I came up with them. They got better one after one. I did not move them around into this order. It is truly how I thought them up. It shows how you get more creative each time.
My Top 11 Favorite Baby Items 70
70 isn’t a terrible score, but let’s make a list of 5 to see if we can improve this title.
The 11 Items I Would Recommend to Every Pregnant Momma 87
11 Baby Items that You Need for Baby 62
11 Baby Items to Add to Your Baby Registry Today 72
My Absolute Favorite Baby Items that You Need 67
My Absolute Favorite Baby Items from a First Time Mom 74
With this second example, you can tell I was all over the place. I came out the gate with a strong title, and then didn’t know where to go from there. I think the score of 87 is the highest I have ever gotten; too bad I didn’t use it for the post I wrote!
How to Survive a Teething Baby 53
We can do better than that. Check out the list of 5 below.
7 Tips for Getting Through Teething with Your Baby 69
How to Provide Your Baby with Comfort and Support While Teething 78
Conquer Teething with These 7 Practical Tips for Your Baby 70
Get Prepared to Help Your Baby Survive Teething with these 7 Tips 83
7 Practical Ways You Can Help Your Baby Get Through Teething 87
Sometimes all it takes is a little effort to greatly improve your title.
Take this title for example My Reasons Why the Moby Wrap is Right for You. It got a score of 61. You can see it on the left side of the image.
Then we slightly changed it to My Top Reasons Why the Moby Wrap is Right for You. It got a score of 81.
All I added was Top. One word. And my score went up 20 points.
I only changed one word and it improved the score by 20
Conclusion
Everyone has to start somewhere. Your titles might not be all that great at first, but you will improve over time. Keep working on it. After a while look back at your old titles and see how much you have improved.
Check Out My Articles
Steps to Take to Have a Successful First Month Blogging
Steps to Take Before Launching Your Blog to Guarantee Success