This weekend a neighbour and his family went away to the Cotswolds for a family celebration. They were away for the whole weekend and before leaving they asked whether we would mind feeding their beloved moggy. Of course we wouldn’t, the kids would be only too happy in fact.
But that’s not the point; you’re not really interested in why we were feeding this feline. You’re not reading this because of some altruistic concern for a cat. If you’re honest with yourself you don’t really care about ‘puss’. You’re reading this because the headline caught your eye.
People who read blogs and are active in the social media arena have thousands of different pieces of information trying to grab their attention every day so you need to make your blog, page or channel stand out. You need to give them a reason to click on your piece above anyone else’s.
Your headline is your shop window, it needs to stop people and make them want to read more. It’s no good putting all the ‘good news’ in the middle of the article if your headline doesn’t spike their interest. So spend some time on it, make it relevant, read it back, but most of all make it interesting.
With an estimated 133 million separate blogs indexed between 2002 and 2009 and 900,000 blog posts every 24 hours being read by 346 million people around the world, you are going to have to go some to create a headline that people are going to notice.
In addition to the great headline once you’ve got them reading one of your posts you need to make it interesting enough for them to want to come back for more. Not only that, you have to keep writing good stuff, write some more and when you’ve done that.....you’ve guessed it – do it again.
It’s an inevitable truism that the more pages/articles/posts you write the more chance you have of them being picked up/hit and read. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again, just because it’s on the internet and appears to be ‘new tech’ doesn’t mean that ONLY new rules apply. If you only ever write one article for a newspaper your audience is going to be limited, write two and you’ve doubled your potential audience there and then. The same applies here.
Despite the vast numbers of pages being posted every day people who read blogs tend to remain reasonably loyal (provided you are saying something interesting). Readers will bookmark your page, stick you in their favourites list and subscribe. Not only that, they will refer others to your site though other vehicles such as twitter. Again the age old adage of ‘content, content, content’ applies, the more you put up - the more traffic you can generate. Start to create a regular and interested following and you can start to generate serious traffic to your website, drive business towards you and before long you will potentially produce some income from both.
But what about the cat?
Really? Are you serious?
The cat is absolutely fine. Fed twice. Kids love it. Can’t wait to do it again....but then, that’s no headline is it?
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