Brrreeeport Bloggers to be Sued by Technorati
OK, that’s not true but let’s talk about sensational headlines and the brrreeeport.
The Brrreeeport experiment to find the best blog search engine has taken on a bit of a life of its own.
Besides getting Scobleizer a sizeable amount of backlinks to his blog and showing which blog search engines perform well, it has given us a few other positives.
For example, Scobleizer himself makes a great point about headlines and the power they have in attracting people to your blog. The brrreeeport experiment is a great way to test how well you can write a headline by visiting the technorati tag for brrreeeport and seeing which headlines stand out.
They are all about the same topic, so you need something a little original to stick out of the crowd.
Writing a catchy headline is hard, but adding an element of conflict to the headline will often solve the problem and get a fair bit of interest in the story.
In fact I suspect that half the readers of the internet ONLY read the headline in order to decide if the story is worthwhile or not. It’s therefore pretty important to make your headlines catchy.
This is one of the reasons that political bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Michael Moore or Ann Couter always seem to generate a storm of activity around their writings. Of course, they usually follow up the headlines with even more conflict oriented commentary, which may or may not be a good thing in your blog. But the point it they get read… a lot!
It only takes an extra 20 or 30 seconds to think of a catchy headline. That’s time well spent if you are aiming to draw a larger readership.
Of course, my headline for this post is a flat out lie, which is probably fine once or twice but it’s not something I would make a habit of. People will simply come to expect me to lie and get sick of it which is not a good thing.
But adding the element of conflict is quite often something that is easy to do for many posts.
If it only increases the attention you get by a few readers, then it is probably worth it to add that dimension of conflict to your post headlines.
Technorati Tags: Brrreeeport, blogging, headlines, technorati
I was looking for posts tagged with technorati, and saw your post title. Suffice to say, it worked in grabbing my attention (since I was one of the hundreds / thousands who did the brrreeeport thing).
Scared me, you did.
(/yoda)
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:40 pmSorry about that Josh - guess it proved my point though!
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:53 pm