In The Beginning There Was The Word… Part One

ave you ever thought how important words are in our life? Have you ever counted how many words you say on average daily? Well I’ll tell you how many – it’s somewhere between 500 – 15000. When you think about it it’s a huge number. But we shouldn’t forget how important is written word in our society. How many signs and adds do you read daily? Once again it’s a huge number. It’s clear that words take up a huge part of our daily lives. But what makes some words better than others, some advertisements more eye-catching than others, some titles more attention catching than others?

It would take many books to fully answer this question, but let’s stick with the basics. Have you ever wondered why there are so many bad magazines about celebrities, which don’t have anything new to say, yet they’re still very popular and make bags of money? Well one the  reasons is that they have eye-catching covers and intriguing titles. Now just stop reading this article for a moment and take any popular magazine or open wordpress.com. Now look at the popular articles or post and pay extra attention to the titles. Do you see how imaginative they are, do you see how eye-catching they are? The biggest reason, why these magazines are popular is that often not content is what sells – the title is.

 Let’s look at some great titles and see why they’re so great. At the time when I’m writing this there are many great post on wordpress.com homepage. For instance there’s a nice article called Wake Up Geek Culture: Time to Live.  First of all, notice how imaginative and intriguing it is – you instantly feel interested in such a title and want to read the whole article.Now let’s come up with a bad title for a similar article and compare them:

Good titles: Wake Up Geek Culture: Time to Live, The Age of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, The Most Dangerous Person to Culture Ever – Lady Gaga

Bad titles: 21st Century Culture, Flaws of Our Culture, Dangers of Pop Culture

The bad titles are bad for simple reasons – they are boring, they are not eye-catching and intriguing, they are not specific enough (you can’t really tell what the article will be about, except for the fact that it’s gonna be about culture, which is very broad).

Let’s take a look at more examples:

Good title: Adulthood: No One Told Me There Would Be Laundry

Bad title: Adulthood or Adulthood Sucks

Once again the bad titles are not informative enough or just simply don’t catch your attention, whereas the good title sounds great and funny (humour makes your titles great). As for the second bad title it simply sounds unprofessional and childish. By the way you should read the above article – it’s a great example of top-notch blogging.

Good title: Don’t Let Winter’s Bad Weather Spoil Your Exercise Time

Bad title: Winter Exercise or Exercises for Winter Period

Now this title is not as imaginative as the other ones, but it’s still a great title, because it’s sounds great, it tells you exactly what the article is about, it sounds so natural and personal, as if a friend was writing a message to you about how to lose some extra weight in winter. The bad titles are fine, however they are boring, they are not eye-catching and there are probably hundreds of articles with such titles.

Words are so important in business, marketing, SEO and Internet websites or blogs, that it’s almost impossible to get many views without at least knowing the basics of writing good titles. I myself just started learning about how to write good titles, but even now I see how many more views it is possible to get by writing interesting titles. Sometimes it might even be more important than the content itself. Thus I hope this article helped you to get more views.

Thanks for reading!