2019: How to write a powerful blog title that drives traffic?
By: Abhay Talreja
Tags: Blogging Tips, Marketing, Blog, Content Marketing, SEO

2019: How to write a powerful blog title that drives traffic?

The first thing that separates your story from thousands of other articles, is your title. It is extremely important to get the right title for your story. Abhay Talreja Follow May 23, 2019 · 11 min read

Photo by Cody Davis

Blog titles are the first part of your blog post that your readers will see and the part that’s responsible for getting them to click through and read the rest.

You might have spent hours and hours of efforts creating a story/content that you publish on the blog. But for a reader, it might be just a 2–5 mins of their time. People are busy. We must optimize our stories for readers’ scarce time. We must respect their time and how will writing a good title help?

The moment you optimize the title of your article, they start to look more appealing. The best place to find appealing titles is any magazine around you. Magazines have amazing headlines/titles. You can start checking out some magazines, or popular news/information websites to take some references.

I have myself spent hours pondering on what should be the title for this very article. Trust me, I revised it at least 15 times before finalizing on this one. I might even continue to edit it after the release of this article, to keep it relevant and appealing with time.

Knowing the importance of having a good title let us dive into the tips that can help you with writing great titles for your blog/story:

Start with a working title

Whenever I plan to write an article, I ponder some time on just getting a title. The reason being, when I start thinking about the content I am going to cover in the article, the title should do justice to the content that is going to follow it. A title may very well be a summary of what you can expect in the article. It should literally say, what you are going to read here on.

A lot of people get confused and end up making their blog titles as topics v/s a blog title. For example, if I am going to write an article on “Skin Care” I won’t just go ahead and make that as my title, that will be more like a topic in itself. An idle title will be something like:

“How to detox your skin this summer?”

“Skin care: 5 tips for healthy skin”

“10 skin care secrets for healthier-looking skin”

Do you see how these titles stand out and that gives the audience an idea on what you are trying to pitch in the article or how my next 3–5 mins will look like.

Again, you have to make it a working title and as you keep writing your article, you will refine it in a way that it does complete justice to the content otherwise it will lead to a disappointed reader. The moment we read the title, we start expecting something from the article, if it doesn’t provide the information we were promised, we don’t feel happy about it.

So make sure to have a working title and keep refining it as you work through the details.

Pay Attention to Titles around you

Every day you encounter titles — not just blog titles, but also the titles of newspaper and magazine articles, the titles of YouTube videos, the titles of emails you receive, an Instagram post, etc. You will always have a response to those titles, even when your response is to ignore one and keep scrolling.

Similarly, if you pay close attention to the titles everyone is coming up with, that should give you an idea of what is working v/s not working for them. See the interactions they have got. Any post which has a good title tends to perform much better than the one without a good title.

One recent study, conducted by Content Marketing Institute, found that including a hyphen or colon in the headline increased the click-through rate by 9%. Now think about the title of this article.