Are you a blogger or freelance writer craving to learn how to create exciting articles and surprising guest posts that create stir and debate? Then you need to use captivating blog titles!
I’ve been in the online marketing game for more than 10 years now, and I’ve seen dozens of different types of articles, such as; how-to tips, resource type articles, ultimate guides, top lists, interview style content, you name it.
You’ve seen them before, right? Did you also notice how most of them are quite boring?
Let’s face it! How often can we read the same “how to generate traffic to your blog” or “how to get blog comments” type of articles? They are predictable, just like a boring movie. There’s nothing exciting or new about the topic for the reader.
You can usually tell if an article lacks a fresh scent just by reading its title. If it doesn’t pull me in and grab my attention, I just skip it altogether. It’s like when you read a newspaper. We skim titles and headlines until one lures us in. You do it, everybody does it!
The first lesson you have to learn before writing captivating types of articles is to make your title unique. It has to stand on its own and get visitors curious about the content.
Think Of Your Title As Cheese For The Mice
This does NOT mean you have to fake your title. You’re not allowed to create titles for the sake of getting readers to read your content, or you’ll lose them forever.
A few months ago, I remember landing on a blog featuring eye-candy posts; 9 out of 10 posts were luring me in. The bad part though was that out of those 9, maybe one had substance, if ever. The blog owner knew how to write “killer” titles, but the content failed to deliver. I am not reading his blog any more!
Captivating Blog Titles Should Always Under Promise and Over Deliver
Take this post for example – “Make More Money with The Affiliates Guide to Blog Commenting for Traffic and Leads”
I wrote it last month. It went viral: 77 comments, 51 tweets and 236 stumbles. The promise I made to readers was simple and subtle – (you’ll learn how to) generate more money (traffic and leads) via blog commenting. They’d expect some how to information and nothing else.
Later down the article, loyal readers stumbled upon a little treasure (this is where I over delivered on my initial promise). I included a list with 30 top industry blogs to comment on.
I spent a few days building the list, which featured 10 blog links, in 3 separate categories:
- Health & Nutrition
- Marketing & Blogging
- Productivity & Self-Help
All links are valid at the time of writing the article. Readers found this part of the article the most valuable, as I’ve helped them skip days (if not weeks) of struggling to find these blogs on their own.
Someone with experience and the right eye can create such a list within days. For a beginner, it may take weeks.
Include A Free Treasure
You cannot imagine how appreciated are links that will save your readers (a ton of) time, money and frustration.
And speaking of treasures, here is a list with 24 of the most captivating blog titles that I’ve read recently and which I hope you’ll find useful and practical for your content writing and blogging activities.
- How to Write Interesting Content for a “Boring” Topic
- The Art of Writing a Captivating Title
- How A Teenager Built A Design Blog In One Year Reaching 650,000 Unique Monthly Visits
- Need More Blogging Traffic? Look At McDonald’s For Inspiration
- Blog Content 2.0: How To Create Pillar Articles In Today’s New Media Obsessed World
- The Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging
- 7 Ways to Kick Off Your Article or Presentation
- Are You Connecting with Your Audience? 5 Tips to Write Compelling Articles
- 52 Types of Blog Posts that Are Proven to Work
- What Your Freelance Blogging Portfolio Says About You: How Clients Decide Who to Hire
- The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine
- 7 Content Archetypes that Generate Natural Links
- Four Things 50 Cent Can Teach You About Connecting with Your Audience
- How to Create Unexpected Content
- The Science of Storytelling: 6 Ways to Write More Persuasive Stories
- Why You Shouldn’t Do Content Marketing
- 17 Types of Content That Google Will Eat Up
- Content Marketing Zen: The 5-Step Process to Creating Remarkable Content
- 50 Things Every Content Marketer Should Know
- What Christopher Columbus Knew About Inbound Marketing That Einstein Did Not
- The 50 Cent Approach to Content Strategy: Get Rich or Die Tryin’
- 6 Ways of Writing an Eye-Grabbing Introductory Paragraph for Your New Blog Post
- How to Get Customers to ‘Imagine This’ Without Asking Them to ‘Imagine This’
- What Napoleon Can Teach You About Writing Killer Blog Posts
You can tell these articles aren’t your average post, yet they have something in common:
- They stir your curiosity and urge you to click. True eye-candy!
- They connect unrelated topics, individuals or activities. Captivating!
- You can read them 5 years later and probably still find them relevant. Ever-green!
Before writing your first controversial article, ensure it packs the ingredients above.
Add Information That Comes From Personal Experiences About A Topic, Skill Or Activity
Let me give you a quick example.
What most people don’t know about me is that I’m a big NBA fan; so I thought how interesting it would be if I wrote an article on affiliate marketing and connect it with basketball.
That’s how I brought into existence: “A Big Lesson I Learned from LeBron James about Making Money Online (that Made Me a Top Affiliate Earner)”. If you want to know the answer, then you’d have to read the article. Its title is quite irresistible, isn’t it?
The sad reality is that most content writers (even the veterans in the game) don’t know how to bring life to an article. They lack the proper knowledge on making old topics exciting, they aren’t even dreaming about connecting two unrelated ideas in a new way.
Using Case Studies
This is where you’re sharing with the audience how you got a specific result or solved a challenge, usually after (countless) trials and errors.
What you’ve read so far is one such example.
If there’s something you should get out of this article, remember this:
An article in case study format that features an eye-candy title can captivate audiences for ages. Hide a treasure within, and you have a high chance to make that article go “viral”.
If you have something to ask or share about this post, then I’m waiting for your input in the comment section below. Let’s take the discussion further. I’d like to know about other captivating blog titles that you’ve stumbled upon (maybe some of them are yours, so feel free to mention their link and title).
About John Gibb
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