Titles are Eric Lyndoman’s passion and he suggests you should Smash a Brick into the face to get another blogger’s attention if you have no prior relationship with that person.
What he really means is that you need a good headline to stop someone in their tracks. The headline does not only exist at the top of the content. It is in the subject text of email, it may be in a twitter post, a rss feed, a digg headline, etc. It is that headline that must get the blogger’s attention if anything is to happen as a result.
Lyndoman talked about smashing a brick for that really great post you have written. However the same principle is at work for all that you write. Some call it the Attention Economy. We all have too little time to do all that we wish to do. This time overload is magnified now with the Mobile Web becoming more prevalent. Your window on the world may well be your cellphone. As you see even more of what is going on, what will stand out from the noise.
More and more people will only see your title or headline. How can you make sure that there is enough to draw their attention, even if they know you already. I suggest that every title you write should be very clear on what is the subject behind it.
The other important phenomenon is that many people are now seeing the world through the small Twitter window of 140 characters and spaces. As evidence, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site, Twitter.
“People really want to do stuff real time and I think Twitter has done a great job about it,” Larry Page, Google co-founder said in a closing address at their Zeitgeist conference . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”
So what does that suggest for our titles. Often people may share a blog post link with their friends by retweeting. If you do the math and allow for the starting “Pl. RT” and the short URL, you may have only less than say 70 characters and spaces for the title, if someone wants to add some words of encouragement or some hashtags.
The title must get the attention of others who will only see that retweet so it should be clear on what they will get by visiting the link. It must signal the promise of something that they will be keen to check out. In practice, 70 characters and spaces gives much more than you really need. This post title takes only 24.
If you are convinced by the logic, why not support the principle by retweeting this post. All you need to do is use that Tell-a-Friend button bottom left (hover and click on Social Twitter) or copy and paste the following in your Twitter Status field.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3dea2cfc-54c4-4091-a0fc-f122f4eb7c46)
Really, this is doing what journalists have long known. It’s why they have special headline editors at major dailies whose sole job is to make in-your-face headlines.
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Barry, in this case, we must analyze it in a long term. If the retweeting stuff can really bring much traffic to one site, it’s nothing wrong to try it; Or else, it’s better to leave the website/blog alone…
@Barry: LOL! I really like the call to action you have put in the end. I agree that people barely get 70 characters to get reader’s attention. I liked the ‘smash a brick’ thingy
Great headlines/titles are essential for linkbaits, retweets and diggs.
I always try to write headlines that “kick people right in the Johnson” just to elicit a reaction. You have to put yourself ahead of all the competition out there on the net!
Thanks Barry for an excellent piece.
To my mind an important aspect of capturing your reader’s attention is to be fresh, original and a little different. If your headline, or for that matter, any text you write, reads like something we’ve all read a hundred times before, it is unlikely to do the job.
One of the tricks I do when stuck for a strong headline is to first think up some weak headlines Рones that are, for example, obvious, boring or clich̩d. This gets all the bad ideas out of my system. Then I know what to avoid and can start to look for something a little more attention grabbing.
It tends to work for me, and hopefully it might work for some of your readers.
Thank you so much for this post! It’s incredibly annoying to have to go through and have to look for ways to shorten someone’s title in order to retweet!
It’s like doing a e-mail subject line. Draw them in!