Sensational headlines and living up to your own hype

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

(My RSS reader on a good day)

Recently I’ve been a bit disappointed by a number of articles. They’ve promised me the world and they’ve delivered nothing short of disappointment and badly re-hashed content. But why should I have expected anything? – Because the title of these articles promised so much.
I know blog titles are written to pull in readers, the way we digest the content through twitter and RSS feeds means that titles are written to get people onto the site and add another eyeball to the all important visitor count.

Sure I know titles like “Win that client pitch everytime” are over the top because if they worked everyone would win every pitch and we’d all get no where. However I still expect something from the article, something that says wow or makes me think “oh yeah” at least a little bit as much as the title but sadly so many articles fall short of the bar they set themselves.
An article that disappoints damages a sites credibility and it gives people a negative impression of the writer and first impressions are hard to shake.

But why does it matter? Well great content leads to return visitors, great content gets tweeted around, great content gets bookmarked, great content gets applauded, great content is… well, it’s great.

So bloggers of the web it’s up to you, you can strike a balance, write honest blog titles and your content will either pleasantly surprise people or be just as dull as the honest title you’ve written

…

Or

…

Just write great content! Content that speaks for itself in a much better way than any title you could have given to it.

I implore you all, please try and do the latter and I will try to do so myself.

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