Long blog post short: please be as descriptive as possible when titling your blog posts. In today’s decontextualized world of walls, feeds, RSS, e-mail, diggs, reddits, Stumbles, tweets, and retweets, you need to attract your potential reader based only on the appeal of your title and nothing else, especially if you’re new to blogging and don’t happen to be Seth Godin.

Use up to the 70 characters that Google indexes for each post title but make sure the most important message of the title are nearer the beginning of the title. Don’t bury the lead in the post and don’t bury the lead in the title, either.

Tweetmeme and other sharing services chop off long titles, so while you can go long, keep your essentials right at the beginning.

A good title is a good habit — here’s why

Recently I wrote the post Blog so you can be taken completely out of context in which I discussed how essential it is to make sure each blog post you write needs to be completely self-contained and self-referential. Looking back, I notice I missed the most important part of every blog post: the blog title.

In 2011, with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, retweets, sharing, and RSS via Google Reader, all anyone ever sees is the title of whatever’s shared, especially if you’re not Beth Kanter, Kami Huyse, Seth Godin, CC Chapman, Shel Israel, Geoff Livingston, Richard Laermer, Olivier Blanchard, Christopher Penn, Chris Brogan or Brian Solis. If you’re one of these bloggers, your title is a little less important; however, your name may well be stripped by the confines of a 140-character world, so a good title is a good habit even for our hallowed celebrities since their personal brand doesn’t always move as fast as the share.

So, though we’re all tempted to indulge in puns, in humor, in wordplay, and in breezy cool, please try to keep put your editor hat on every time you post to your blog. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Five Ws and an H.

Also, remember that the title you choose needs to be both appealing, compelling, accurate, and trustworthy to both your human readers and also to machines: the spiders and bots that Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Bing, and the other search engines send to visit your blogs and everyone else’s shares.

I hate it that WordPress asks for a title first because the title should be one of the last things you provide. I like to save my summary paragraph and my final title until the last minute and two of my editors — JD Lasica, here, and Mike Moran of Biznology — almost always provide my posts with even more focused titles and summary paragraphs. Of course, these two gems are reformed journalists, so I benefit greatly from their experience.

For this post, I chose “The big secret to getting people to read your blog,” though I would have loved to choose something more cheeky like “All you got is your title” or “You need to have them at hello” or “Bait your blog post with a great title.” But in the end, straightforward wins.

I know how I consume blogs, Twitter, and my Facebook wall, and 70% of my click-throughs are based on the title of the post. Another 20% is based on the person who does the sharing — including the blogger — and the final 10% is the blog it’s on, such a Mashable. That’s my percentage, but an excellent title can draw me to a blog and blogger I have never heard of via a tweeter I don’t know — even to a blog that is obviously a promotional platform.

Coming up with the essence of what your blog post is about

What do you need in your title? Simple: Read your post through and try to summarize it all into a sentence. Don’t concern yourself like I do as to whether your title wraps on the blog when posts (it doesn’t matter) and also please do not bait and switch the content or stuff keywords that are not germane to the post.

And, it bears repeating, Google indexes 70 characters of each title tag, so use as many relevant characters as possible. However, some other services don’t, so while you should use as many characters as you need to finish your thought, make sure your most important concepts are weighted towards the front of the title to make sure that the lead isn’t cut off in a retweet or share.

Do you have other tips and tricks for getting folks to click through to your posts? It’s a competitive blogosphere and mediasphere out there!

Via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz viaMarketing Conversation

Just received this in my inbox from Seth Godin. On winning. I found the part on demagoguery most compelling:

A demagogue cares so much about winning that he’d rather wreck the system itself than lose. It’s okay, he believes, to root for the failure of the republic or to destroy civility or democracy if it leads to something that could be called a win.

Seth’s post is about winning but it just reminds me how the far right feels like it is just fine to completely trash our peacetime-democratically-elected president and government just to get what they want — to win.

What is winning? Is there a vision? Surely not just returning our country to 1776?

To an orthodoxy that runs on two documents: the Bible and the Constitution, literally read and never interpreted?

Even though our Founding Fathers were enlightenment Masons who were more afraid of an ignorant theocratical America than whatever the right is afraid of.

They’re really not afraid of any of this stuff. They’re more interested at winning. They’re more interested in the win and are more than happy to trash everything, lie through their teeth, and get caught again and again in hypocrisy — conflicting realities — to leverage fear — all FTW!

If all you’re trying to do is move forward with your vision and passion to reach a goal, you’ll never get anywhere if you back down or reconsider your behavior every time someone calls you arrogant.

Seth Godin and I agree on that and you should read his article from this morning, titled Arrogant.

This is a fear and a paradox of doing work that’s important.

A fear because so many of us are raised to avoid appearing arrogant. Being called arrogant is a terrible slur, it means that you’re not only a failure, but a poser as well.

It’s a paradox, though, because the confidence and attitude that goes with bringing a new idea into the world (“hey, listen to this,”) is a hair’s breadth away, or at least sometimes it feels that way, from being arrogant.

And so we keep our head down. Better, they say, to be invisible and non-contributing than risk being arrogant.

That feels like a selfish, cowardly cop out to me. Better, I think, to make a difference and run the risk of failing sometimes, of being made fun of, and yes, appearing arrogant. It’s far better than the alternative.

Are you called arrogant? Do you call people you know arrogant?  Why? What defines arrogance to you?

To be honest, the only way to truly move forward and achieve what you want in the world is to keep your eye on the prize and don’t let fear — or the manipulative and diminishing comments of others — to keep you from your mission.

Most of the time, even people who love you just aren’t comfortable with the changes in you — or fear losing you or being left behind.

Why are advertisers so darn sneaky these days? Seth Godin surely wants to know in his recent post It’s no wonder they don’t trust us. Advertisers seem to constantly trying to hoodwink us into missing a radio button or check box that will result in a new browser toolbar or membership in an opt-out email list.

It isn’t nefarious, though, it is just the result of lots and lots of marketers trying out new tactics to see what works, and apparently sneaky does work — for now.  That said, it is building up a lot hostility from us, the users.

What works is what people are doing on radio, especially AM radio, which is to make the sponsors, advertisers, and ads 1) completely relevant to the programming and what the listener (and the host) would want and 2) let the listener know that this quality programming is available (for free) because of the corporate underwriters.

Seth Godin is a rockstar.  Again I say it. While my friends are amused and frustrated by my constant obsession with “maximizing monetization,” I am an amateur compared to most firms and sites that are constantly “bundling” up browser tool bars and opt-out email lists and anti-virus software and pop-ups and pop-unders — even when installing a new PC, as Godin experienced and shares with us in It’s no wonder they don’t trust us.

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they’ve been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.

Every since advertising embraced “psychology” in the 50s and 60s, they entire industry just assumed we hated ads — we never hated ads, we hate ad men.  Anyway, with advertising psychology and neural linguistic programming (NLP) there was a sudden focus on the subconscious and our lack of ever-vigilance.

I am a huge fan of radio shows of the 30s and 40s — they’re all straight shooters.  The only reason why people are no longer impressed is twofold: they seemed to be always promoting cigarettes and because we consider ourselves more modern and sophisticated — and these old corporate-sponsored variety shows just seem too unsophisticated.

Well, I think people could use a little straight-shooting in 2010 and I am hoping that advertising and financial under-writing and advertising and bundling becomes more transparent, more opt-in, and more clear as to why all of this monetization indeeds need to be done — and the answer is generally, “so that we can make this less expensive — or free — for you, the user,” which I think is a fair-enough reason.

Here’s another blog post wherein I just steal and post Seth Godin‘s consistent and constant insight and clarity:  How to lose an argument online

Darren Rowse always has amazing stuff — consistently and over the long haul. Again, the ProBlogger knocks it out of the park with 27 Must Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers:

Here are the posts that the bloggers I asked nominated as their best tips for bloggers:

Seth Godin from Seths Blog

• How to Get Traffic to Your Blog
• How to Send a Personal Email
• First, ten

Rand Fiskin from SEOmoz

• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
• Blogging in an Oversaturated Market is Usually a Poor Decision
• 21 Tips to earn links and tweets to your Blog Posts

Skellie from Skelliewag

• A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images
• How to Start or Start Over Building Your Personal Brand
• 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog

Chris Garrett from ChrisG

• Grow your google authority
• Diggbait, Linkbait, Flagship Content and Authority
• The art of getting things wrong

Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey

• How To Write Great Blog Content – The Pillar Article
• Why Don’t Bloggers Understand Email Marketing?

Jeremy Schoemaker from Shoemoney

• My Top 10 Worst Ideas to Make Money
• Why You Should Embrace Negative Press

Maki from Dosh Dosh

• 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website
• Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic
• You’re Not Just a Writer, You’re the Editor-in-Chief.

Liz Strauss from Successful Blog

• 10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments
• The Secret to Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming
• 7 Great Ways to Connect with Other Bloggers While You’re Out Reading Blogs

Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips

• 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
• How to Find Advertisers for your Website

Chris Brogan from ChrisBrogan.com

• 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level
• 40 Ways to Deliver Killer Blog Content
• 27 Secrets to Power your Community