Crafting better post titles to draw in more readers

I wrote about Triberr recently and since every day I log in and approve the other blog topics I tweet about, I see quite a few blog post titles. And sorry Triberr tribe mates but I see some really bad ones.

Your blog post’s title is basically your headline for your post. It needs to draw the reader in.  Just like choosing an awesome book cover for your book can make the difference whether someone picks up or clicks on your book, so it is with your post title. Your headline is the equivalent of your cover for your book. Making it enticing will ensure that readers will read your post. Write a boring, complicated or confusing title and it doesn’t matter what you’ve written in the post – very few people will ever read it.

Now while I got the idea for this blog subject by looking at my Triberr feed, your post title matters not only because it appears there but other social media sites, as links from other bloggers, in RSS feeds, search engine results and on your own archive pages. Don’t just assume followers of your blog will see this title. Write it with other readers in mind.

Decent/Good titles

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Bad/Need work titles

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These bad examples don’t tell the reader what the blog is about. Nothing about them draws you in or would make someone want to click on them. Now as you note, I listed my title for my Quote of the Week under bad/need work titles. I happen to label each weekly post the same thing just like on Fridays when I list “Featured Author: Your name here” as the title to my post. I do this for consistency and for ease of titling them posts. I leave the other three days to write better headlines to draw in the readers.

Now a few tips to help you out when designing your own post titles.

Length

Your best bet is to keep your headline short and simple. Not only is this easier to read and comprehend but also many search engines only show about 65 characters so if you have a long title all of it won’t appear in the search results.

While only a handful of words (think 10 words or less), these are the most powerful words that you will write because most of your readers will decide whether to read your post based on these words. If your current headlines are 10 words in length or more, have a look at how you could cut these down to make them more powerful and to the point.

Let the reader know what is in it for them.

When crafting your title, consider what benefit your readers will get out of reading this post. Are you giving them tips? Offering them something for free? Of course using the word “free” in your headlines is a proven method of getting people to take notice.

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• How to double your blog traffic
• Free this week only – The Search (a short story)

Writing good headlines and titles is a skill bloggers need to learn. So take the time to write the best title with your target audience in mind and you will increase your blog traffic.

Joining Triberr to expand the reach of your blog

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about joining author groups for support. In my post, I briefly mentioned Triberr which I joined in August. I had a reader comment about not really understanding Triberr, so I thought I would devote a post to it.

Triberr is a free resource for bloggers to drive traffic to their blog using Twitter. Triberr users become members of “tribes” comprised of bloggers with similar interests.  The idea is that your tribe supports each other by retweeting members’ blog content and thus expanding your reach to potential blog readers. (more on this in a second)

To get started, of course, you must sign up for Triberr. To join a tribe, you must receive an invitation from the tribe “chief.” There is a section called “bonfires” where you can find people who are looking for tribes or tribe members.

Once you have joined a tribe, you connect your RSS feed (a format for delivering regularly changing web content) to that tribe. Then any new posts that you put on your blog will be available for others to tweet. Their posts will also be available for you to tweet. You can preview and approve each tweet before it goes out. Triberr schedules your approved tweets to go every 20 minutes unless you change the setting to have them spaced further apart.

So you say how is this going to help me? Well, it is all about reaching more people. If I were to tweet about my blog, I will reach my 2000 followers. But with Triberr, my message can reach every one of my Tribe mate’s followers too. With my tribe, my reach has been expanded to 126,800 people. Of course, this is assuming that every one of my 20 tribe mates actually tweets out my message, which is rarely the case.

But the nice thing is you can easily see which members shared your message and even how many people have clicked on the short link to that post.

Of course, I started Triberr about two weeks after I started my blog so it is hard to say how much of my blog traffic is generated from Triberr versus my own tweeting.  But I do like that I have the potential each day to reach thousands of other people who might be interested in what I blog about.

The key to remember is that Triberr is a tool, and it works best when all members of the tribe are active and supporting each other. If that happens, you have the ability to get greater reach for your blog. But don’t get caught up in the numbers. Remember that you are working on connecting with others and the best way to do that is to offer quality content on your blog.