Blog Post Titles Make all the Difference in Newsreaders

How do you get your subscription reading rate up and keep it up? There are a lot of factors involved, and a lot of various methods for getting the word out about your blog, but this is quick and easy and greatly impacted my subscription rate within a week.

• I created a sitemap using the WordPress sitemap plugin. This baby worked like a charm. Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final
• I went back over my query results of last week and put those words into my keywords list in the header.  
• I started using more terms and keywords in my posts that I know people are interested in at the moment. If they come to the site through a search and like the site, they have a chance of subscribing. 
• I started up like crazy on MyBlogLog for some community.

Now for the meat and potatoes of my post. Once you get a subscriber for the first time, they will have you on their list of feeds and now it is up to your post titles to get them to come back. They may never visit your site again or even delete your feed if they don’t read the feeds or visit your site.

Titles Grab Your Attention…

and get people reading your feed to click-through to your blog. I am a big fan of Netvibes and I have it all sorted and set up just the way I want. When I get to the office in the morning, while I’m still eating my breakfast sandwich (breakfast #2, usually) I open up Netvibes and scan the daily headlines.

This is no different from the past when people went out to the driveway (or bushes) to grab the morning paper to read at the table. They’ve got their morning beverage and some food and do what? Scan the headlines to see if they want to read any more.

With Newsreaders, you get 1 chance to grab someone’s attention. There are no graphics or fonts or colors to pull someone in. Here, more than anywhere else in your post, words matter in a very precise and real way. Unless someone has a newsreader that shows the title and a short excerpt, you have between 5-10 words to get people to click.

Here are some examples of some very good titles I have seen this week:

• If No One Reads What You Write, That’s Because It Sucks
• The P.T. Barnum Guide to Online Publicity
• Do You Hold Your Clients Up to High Standards
• Is Digg just for traffic?
• WoW’s Greatest Little Items You Have Never Heard Of
• Just Because You Love An Idea Doesn’t Mean It Will Sell

After you get that initial click, the rest is easy. Assuming your title matches the content of the story, and you have something to offer the reader on your site, they will go all the way to your blog, all because of the title.