Juiced On Writing

Or is it?

Darren Rowse, on the must-read Problogger blog, is running a contest this week – a contest that asks us to write a “Killer Title“.

It’s what he calls a group writing project. The winner – selected randomly (so no great shakes if I’m not creative or killer enough) gets a $2000 logo design. But anyone participating in this writing project, is encouraged to surf around the list of participating blogs, and therefore possibly increase traffic to those blogs, and discover some more blogs to add to your reading list (I use Google Reader – it’s list function makes reading quicker and easier).

Problogger has been running a series of blogs on what makes a killer title recently, the main one (for me) being How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers into Your Blog. Writing for me, isn’t just about learning how to craft a novel (let’s face it, it’s easy to come up with a chapter name if you’re just sticking to chapter numbers – Chapter 1, Chapter 2…) but I’ve become very aware of titles lately in online writing work.

Last night I downloaded some packages I bought a couple of days ago. In fact, the downloads took several days to get through, and many will probably go unused. But in the packaged info products and software came a package of 100 PLR articles (Private Label Rites, where people author articles normally on the high hit internet marketing topics and you get to use them unreservedly, rewrite them, publish them as your own – the whole she-bang).

What did I want with 100 PLR articles? Well, for 75 of them, nothing – I don’t want to learn golf by an e-article, nor yachting or even 25 on summer vacations. But the last 25 – on time management – well, those might be useful, I thought.

Time Management is one of the bigger niches in internet marketing. Ways to make or save money are number one, but you can do a little with self-improvement needs if looking for areas to make a bit of money. So they say, anyway. But I was just interested in reading some copy on how to improve my own time management skills.

Until I opened the package, that is. Problogger suggests using keywords in titles is a good thing. I’ve done the same for this blog entry – notice the “Writing” in the title. And I managed to get in “Creative” also. But that was me being more mindful that the title wasn’t actually creative at all. I like the irony really.

But these 25 PLR articles on time-management took the whole keyword thing to such a degree that I was left not wanting to open them up at all, all twenty five seriously look to me as an exploitation of the keyword title concept, and similar in content (ie monotonous) as well. “How to Improve Your Time Management”, “The Importance of Time Management”, “How to [Play, Buy, Improve, Learn, Teach, Focus...fill in here] Time Management [Games, Skills, Processes] for your [Own Good, Employee's Benefit, Job Retention, Children, Kids, Workplace, Relationship]“.

You get the gist. But really, what else might I expect from a package marketed to internet marketers in the first place, and one which is PLR? The titles use all the keywords someone searching for such information may use. Optimized for search engines via keywords.

But there must be a slight difference when actually writing fresh content for a blog or online zine. Fresh being the operative word. In the Crafting Titles article at Problogger, eight tips are given for blog titles which are (abbreviated) -

1. Communicate a benefit
2. Create controversy or debate
3. Ask a question
4. Personalize titles
5. Use keywords
6. Use power words (stunning, free, easy, secrets…)
7. Big claims or promises
8. Humor

So, have I managed some of that within this title? I’d like a pass on number 2, 3, 5 and a um, maybe on number 8, thanks.

But mainly, the group writing project has opened up my eyes to some of those blog titles out there. I read a lot of my virtual friends blogs out there (as I would hope that they read mine) and I must admit a lot of my first reading decisions is based on a glance at the title.

Remembering that this blog post will, within a couple of hours, appear as a title and link in twitter, and later in friendfeed, the art of writing killer titles which draw in further readership is a good one for me to learn. Plus – it’s fun, isn’t it, and it enhances our writing skills at the same time.

(Edited 2 days later thanks to a comment pointing out I’d mispelled a name.)

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