Note to readers with blogs: people out there actually do want to read you.

That might be surprising to some who think they’ll never get (enough) readers for their blog, but there is one lithmus test that must first be passed, especially for readers like me who are severely time-challenged.

The eBay test.

No, you don’t have to actually become an eBay seller, but take a look around eBay for a moment and find something with a lot of competing product listings. Those sellers had 55 characters, not 55 words to write something enticing to potential bidders. 55 freaking characters! Now write down which ones interested you and ask yourself why? What about this text interested you?

Want to see how long is 55 characters? Here’s a form input that only allows 55 characters, now try to make a title for your next blog entry with less than 55 characters:

What’s the point?
If you can’t get people’s attention with a few words, how will you keep it with a few hundred? Take a look at the following picture:

Which text links stick out among this list of links? My link is in there, can you guess which one it is (without looking back on the site)?

Perhaps the most underutilyzed component of a blog post is the title. Some bloggers care so little for these precious words that they use a date or have no title at all. There are good reasons that writers and publishers go to great depths to choose the right title. When people are browsing all they see is the cover of the book, the title, and the author name. If you are Stephen King you don’t need a good dust jacket or even a good title, you just need your name in gigantic font. If you are the rest of the writers busting your butt to get noticed, you need something to grab attention.

And once they read you, there better not be disappointment. Deliver.

Here’s the good news: the more you post, the more chances you get to work on good titles in addition to good writing. If your last title was weak, there is always the next one to redeem yourself.

If you post say three times a day, that’s three chances a day to select the best title. You have three teasers to snatch reader attention among the millions of other blogs, so what magic words will you use?

Being interesting to the search engines and readers
It is possible to write descriptive, relevant headlines that people might search for and also pique the curiosity of eyeballs but it isn’t easy. Here are a few techniques which might help:

- write down two or three keywords that describe the content of the story and blend those into the title creatively
- consider using key (short) quotes within articles or stories you are writing about. For example, the quote from Google’s blog was so juicy I decided to use for the title (pictured above)
- play on words. For example, I combined the word accident and Adsense to make the word: accidense
- avoid getting too cutesy with titles and not summarizing the post body. If the title has nothing to do with the post it’s a big risk that is more likely to backfire than not. Readers don’t want to feel like they got suckered.
- when in doubt, be boring. If you can’t think up a good title, then just come up with something descriptive with no sizzle. It’s better than doing a “no title” or just having the date.

Hopefully this post has readers with blogs think more about titles. I enjoy reading good posts, regardless of the quality of the title, but a creative, relevant title can spark new readers who see just the title and nothing more.

Your turn. If you have a couple dozen links to choose from and the title is all you have, how do you choose? Is it a certain combination of words? Something that makes you left? An compelling mix of words?

I thought about the title for this piece and decided to use death. A piece of writing without any readers is lifeless. Obviously a corpse can’t read, but suggesting that there might be some tips here to make one reanimate is the type of headline that I would be curious about. But then again, I like horror fiction, so I’m a sucker for a macabre reference. I also flirted but ultimately discarded the idea of mixing in Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55″ and making the title “Why can’t type 55?”

The more I think about that one, it’s probably better. Alas, I’m taking my chances with the dead guy.

What types of titles do you like or dislike?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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