The focus of this month’s writing group was creating blog titles to grab the attention of readers. We looked at advice from Corey Wainwright’s blog post on the subject, which outlined the following key points:
- Start with a working title – note down a rough title to give you a focus when you start writing a post. Once you’ve finished you can come back to finesse it.
- Stay accurate – set clear expectations for your reader; what you say is what they’ll get. If you are like the boy who cried wolf, people won’t bother reading your posts in the future.
- Make it sexy – have fun with your words using devices such as alliteration. Also, consider eye-catching images that will work with your title.
- Keep it short – aim to make it easily digestible for your reader. Reading it out loud will help you do this.
- Try to optimise for search and social – think about keywords and try to place them at the beginning of your title. Optimise your title for search engines by keeping it under 70 characters. This also makes it more Tweetable because it leaves space for readers to write a comment.
- Brainstorm with someone else – run your ideas past a colleague to get a fresh perspective.
Do you have any tips on creating catchy titles you’d like to share? If so, write a comment below.
Following Tatiana Dias’s suggestion, we’re using the Learning at City Writing Guidance as a framework for the topics in the upcoming sessions of the writing group. So next month’s session will look at tone – making posts conversational. If you’d like to lead a session or would like a specific topic dealt with, email me at – daniel.sansome@city.ac.uk.
For more advice on blogging and time to sit down and write that post you’ve been meaning to do for ages – come along to the next Writing Group on Wednesday 6th December at 13:00 in ELG05.
