This guest post is by Eric Cummings and Michael Cummings of On Violence.
Nearly a year and a half into making small strides in one of the smallest niches on the Internet—the MILblog (military blog) community—our traffic started going up. We had one question.
Why?
Our guess is that—in addition to some great guest posts—we started writing better headlines. People want to read articles with great headlines. From the very beginning, we knew we should have been writing good headlines—it was one of the first tips we read. So why did we avoid writing analytics-crushingly good headlines?
Because of the tabloids.
We’ve all been at the check-out counter, looked over and seen the tabloids screaming, "Snooki Sex Tape!" What? Or, "Brad Leaves Angelina!" Double what!? "Obama is an Alien!" Triple what! So you pick up the magazine, and none of that is in there. Snooki just got drunk. Brad is on vacation. Obama is still human. You're understandably disappointed: you've fallen for the tabloids.
I think bloggers do the same thing. In an ever busier, fuller blogosphere, we battle one another with our headlines. We fight each other to write gripping, sticky headlines, clawing over one another with more outlandish declarations of greatness like, "The 10 Tips To Guarantee Blogging Success" or "How to Make A Billion Dollars Blogging, Today!" Bloggers are, in the words of Cmdr. "Stinger" Johnson, writing checks their butts can't cash.
And the average member of the public is sick of it. Even John Stewart has made fun of it.
If every post you have is turned up all the way, your readers will go deaf. Take “Please RT,” for example. Asking your followers to retweet a post will almost guarantee your tweets get more views. But if you "Please RT" every other tweet, as opposed to just the occasional special tweet, “please RT” loses its meaning. You'll lose followers, or your...
