If the front door doesn’t catch people’s attention, they won’t come in.  The headlines of anything you write – blog posts, email subject lines, ads, etc., are like doors.  It doesn’t matter how great the content is inside if nobody opens the door.  So your first job is to get people to want to come inside.  Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a blog post on 15 Ways To Rework Your Next Blog Post Title.

Obviously the article’s focus is blogs, but I think the 8 tips for writing compelling blog post titles are applicable to all headlines.  It’s really a small and basic lesson in copywriting.  For your convenience I’ve reprinted the first 8 tips, though I recommend you read Darren’s entire post here.

1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post.
2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post.
3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers.
4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post.
5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well.
6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging.
7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention.
8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.

Reprinted from Problogger.net

By the way, all these tips are also applicable to Twitter.  Your Twitter tweets are really just headlines. Posting links to content with creative headlines you come up with is a great way to hone your headline writing skills.

Tracking however is essential to do this so that you can see which headlines get the most response.  Sometimes headlines I think are great end up flopping and ones I think are duds get hundreds of clicks.  So make sure you track!  My favorite tools to do this are Budurl and Hootsuite.

Other Related Posts You Might Like

• Where To Get Killer Headlines For Your Emails and Blog Posts
• Why I’m Spilling the beans on Twitter profits with ZERO followers… (TIME SENSITIVE Post)
• Why I Quit Qwitter For Twitter
• To Follow or Not To Follow ALL Twitter Followers?
• The Rise and Fall of Twitter??

Last week I sent a survey to my list asking them whether they wanted more, less, or the same amount of email from me.

I couldn’t believe the results of the survey!

I wasn’t sure what the results would be…

But here they are:

RESULTS

5.9% said "Yisel you’re sending me too many emails, please slow this train down to about an email once a month."

11.8% said "Yisel, keep things like they are, email me about once every other week and keep me posted with what you think will most help me."

82.4% said "Yes Yisel send me emails any time you have something on your mind – I want EVERYTHING!"

So, I guess I’ve got my work cut our for me to them the best.

Before I sent out the survey I thought the majority would want about the same amount of email from me.

LESSON

If you guess what you’re subscribers want, you’ll be wrong. If you really want to know what they want – ASK THEM!

I did also introduce the 5.9% that said I’m sending too many emails to the UNSUBSCRIBE button.

After all, if I’m not gonna serve them the way they want, it’s best we part our separate ways.

P.S. I also told my subscribers I was working something out for them that would REALLY REALLY help them with blogging, even if they didn’t have a blog yet.
I’ll be sending them an email on this tomorrow.

But, if you’d like to cut in front of everyone before tomorrow and see what it is – here is the link:
http://budurl.com/blognow

In his latest podcast, Stephen Pierce gives out "5 Make Mo’ Money Tools To Make You Drool"

I haven’t tested all of them myself, but I thought I’d list them here and have you try them out yourselves. I have my eye on one in particular that looks promising.

Here are the five:

1. AdGridWork.com is a blog advertising network and link exchange.

2. iLikeToBlog.com is a wordpress plugin and also link exchange.

3. TweetBeep.com is the Google Alerts of Twitter. You can set keywords that you want to be alerted on, so you can jump in or follow conversations you’re interested in.

4. Twtqpon.com besides being the strangest and hardest to pronounce social media domain ever, it allows you to create coupons exclusive for your followers (or tweeps). The domain is supposed to be short for Twitter Coupon. Yeah, I know. Go figure.

5. Adcause.com This service allows you to place ads inserted between your Twitter feed. I tried a similar service several months back out of curiosity but decided I just didn’t want to turn my feed into a tweetboard (billboard). If you do decide to use it, don’t abuse it lest you annoy your tweeps and they hit the "Unfollow" button faster than you can say "Twtqpon".

So there you go, try them out and come back and let us know how they worked out.

Other Related Posts You Might Like

• 5 Twitter Tools That Save You Time
• Why I Quit Qwitter For Twitter
• To Follow or Not To Follow ALL Twitter Followers?
• How To Take Twitter Offline
• How To Move Your Wordpress Blog To A New Domain

I’ll be guest blogging on my friend Alejandro Reyes’s hot Social Media Marketing and Internet Marketing Strategies Blog.

You’ll find my posts every Thursday.

My first post has raised some eyeballs. Join the discussion here:

Would You Like To Make More Money

Other Related Posts You Might Like

• More Blogging and Twitter Tools To Make You Drool
• How To Move Your Wordpress Blog To A New Domain
• “Quack, Quack”, said the duck.

Recently I moved my old blog at www.yiselLIVE.com to this new domain.

But just like moving to a new house, you have to pack all your stuff (blog posts) so you can find them, or more importantly, so your visitors clicking on an old link can find them.

After much searching and hair pulling this is the best resource I found to do that.

How To Move A Wordpress Blog or Website

Other Related Posts You Might Like

• More Blogging and Twitter Tools To Make You Drool
• Guest Blogging on Successfool.com