Writing Bad Titles – How To Lose A Reader In 3 Seconds

What is the most importantpart of your article or blog post? Is it the introduction where you let your audience know what they are in for? What about the main body of the article where they have their problems solved or the resources box where you put your call to action?

The most important piece of real estate is your title. Get this wrong and you lose your hard earned readers in 3 seconds flat. Stop for a moment and consider how your audience will deal with the content that you create for them. First, they read your title. If they think it will solve their problems, they will follow the link to read the full article.

Next, they will read the introduction paragraph. This might take 30 seconds depending on how fast they read or the length of text. The last test is the body of the article. Are you giving them what you promised?

In total, there are three gates for your audience to pass through before they get to where you want them to be. And that is the conclusion or bio box at the end with your self-serving links. If a reader chooses not to pass through any of these gates, then the article fails to meet that end goal.

For you as the writer, the most important gate is the title. This is what creates the all important first impression. You have just 100 characters to create interest and get that all important click. With this in mind, I am astounded as a site owner how often people get this wrong. I get several requests to be a guest author on my sites with titles such as -

Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS)? Are You Really Taking Care Of It Or Just Putting A Bandaid On It? Real Natural Solutions! Read This!

Core Value Eating

Muscle building

These are real titles I just pulled from my request list. It does not matter how good the article is, I simply wont bother reading it if it has a title like these. The first is excessive and is wasting valuable real estate with junk words. Putting 'read this' into a title is a quick way to turn off your audience.

The next two titles are not descriptive enough. The author has only mentioned the general market the article is discussing. What benefit am I going to get by investing my time in reading this article? An article title is not a classic 'who dunnit' where you keep the audience guessing.

If you are really bad at writing titles (and I think we all agree that we just read three substandard examples), here is a simple template to help you write more effective openers. It won't write brilliant titles for you, but if you go from a poor writer to an average or even good writer, then your results will increase significantly.

Think about your article and then answer three questions -

1. What is your micro niche? Really drill down here. 2. What is reader going to get? 3. What is the benefit to them for reading your article?

Lets apply this simple template to the PMS title we read earlier.

1. What is the micro niche – PMS pain 2. What is the reader going to get – natural solutions 3. What is the benefit to the reader – reduce premenstrual pain

Put it all together we get –

PMS Pain – 3 Natural Solutions To Reduce Premenstrual Pain

Now you have a starting point, play around with it a little if you want -

PMS Pain – How To Naturally Put An End Premenstrual Pain In Just A Few Days

PMS Pain – How To Naturally Put An End Premenstrual Pain With Few Side Effects

These are good titles. They are not great titles, but this template will give you far better results than trying to pack half of your word count into the heading.

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