Posts Tagged headlines

Humor in Blogging: Good Idea Or Bad?

Posted by Paul in Blogging, RSS and Podcasting, Internet Marketing on December 29, 2009

If you ever needed a further indication that we LOVE comments here on Slyvisions, this should take care of that in perpetuity.  Today I’m talking about a point commenter Jose Anajero posted on our “How Smiling Can Kill Your Blog” post.  He said:

I’ve just started studying web copywriting and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned so far:

“Rule No. 18: Avoid humor. You can entertain a million people and not sell one of them. There is not a single humorous line in two of the most influential books in the world—the Bible and the Sears, Roebuck catalog” (John Caples, 1975).

Perhaps that can also be applicable to blogging?

Thanks Paul for your interesting post.

Jose

First off, Jose, thanks for that great comment.  And I’m beginning to think that jokes in headlines may not be a good idea.  They’re a great place to catch attention, to use keywords to their utmost, to summarize an article, not to crack jokes.  That’s what the body of the blog is for.

Humor in blogging isn’t a bad thing.  It keeps posts fresh and exciting while people read.  But in headlines, it may be somewhat misplaced.

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Two Headlines On Your Post: Why Colons and Hyphens Are Your Friend

Posted by Paul in Blogging, RSS and Podcasting, Internet Marketing on October 28, 2009

There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to making a headline for each of your blog posts.  One, you can make your headline catch attention and draw interest to the post itself.  Two, you can make a search-engine friendly headline that contains key words.

Or, you can tell both of these schools you’re not enrolling and instead do BOTH at once.

See, with keywords in your posts, you’ll draw the search engines in but your readers won’t be as engaged.  A post titled “The Oreck XL 350″ really doesn’t get the interest the way “This Vacuum Cleaner Really Sucks” does.  The other way around switches the terms–no search engine is going to return a lot of hits for “So, Guess Who Got Engaged?” even though your readers will likely be scrolling down just to see what the answer is.

One good way to split this difference is to do both at once.  For instance, in the above examples, you can split the difference by trying:

“The Oreck XL 350: A Vacuum Cleaner That Really Sucks”.

or

“So, Guess Who’s Getting Engaged?  Hint: It’s Not Gerard Butler.”

Now what you’ve done is added both a keyword to bait the search engines and an interesting aside for your readers.

Your readers are valuable, but you always need more of them.  So don’t forget to work both sides of the fence, whether by expanding your headlines or by varying the style.

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