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Make Money Blogging
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Home » Writing Your Blog » How To Get More Readers With a “Benefit” Blog Headline
A long, long time ago, back in the early days of TV, one of the most popular shows was “Dragnet”, starring Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday. It seemed like just about every show, the police would be interviewing a lady witness, who would get into a long-winded explanation of what she saw. And Sgt. Friday would cut her off with, “Just the facts, ma’am!” It’s a good line to remember when you’re writing your blog post headline. There is a strong temptation to be funny, or to be clever, or to be really innovative. It’s a good idea to resist this impulse. “Funny” is very difficult to execute well in a headline. Often it appears offensive to the reader. “Clever”, more often than not, totally falls flat. The reader doesn’t get the cleverness, and so there is no reason for them to read the article. And “innovative” tends to just lose people. Time is so precious these days. People will only stop to read an article that really promises to deliver a result that is really valuable to them. So use your headline to get that message across to them directly. Just tell them exactly what benefit they will get from reading your article. Examples:
For many of us who like to write, it’s natural to try to be clever. That’s OK. Just recognize that you need to edit out that cleverness, especially in your headlines. In fact, my first headline for this article was, “Just The Facts, Ma’am!” And that would have meant nothing to anyone younger than 50. Benefits may not be clever, but they are very safe. Better - they are what your readers are looking for. Tags: benefits, blogging, blogs, fans, headlines Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Writing Your Blog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave a Reply |
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