Five Great Places to Find Your Next Blog Post Title

Posted: 10 Apr 2014 08:00 AM PDT

Do you struggle to come up with titles for your blog posts?

You might not be short of topic ideas … but somehow, the actual titles end up sounding boring and bland.

Here are six great places to find the title for your next blog post:

#1: Other Blogs

Now, I'm definitely not suggesting that you should steal another blogger's title … but you can definitely use one of their titles as a template.

This often works well with blogs outside your own niche (as then their title can't work for you without some changes).

Let's say you want to use a title from DailyBlogTips for inspiration. Hey, why not have the title of this post? Here are a few possible twists on it.

Six Great Places to Find Your Next Blog Post Title (original title)

Six Great Places to Find Your Next Short Story Idea (creative writing blog)

Ten Great Places to Find Amazing Images for Your Website (blogging / online marketing blog)

Five Great Ways to Find Unusual but Delicious Recipes to Try Out (cooking blog)

#2: Magazines

To stay profitable, magazines have to come up with great, interesting titles – and they'll print the best of these on the front cover.

If you glance over a rack of magazines, you'll notice that they often:

Use numbers (e.g. "100 Best Gadgets Ever!" from Stuff magazine)
Ask questions (e.g. "Could a mentor change your life?" from Psychologies magazine).
Use emotionally-charged words (e.g. "Lose your last 10 pounds! #1 secret inside" from Health magazine).

Grab any magazine that you have lying around the house, or head to the shops to see plenty of great examples. Grab a notebook and jot down any title ideas they inspire.

#3: Books

While some books might, like magazines, simply provide you with a good title idea, really well-known books can be a great way to tap into a framework that readers already have (and even borrow a bit of authority).

For instance, my post 7 Habits of Serious Writers draws on Stephen Covey's famous book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Obviously, you'll want to pick books that your readers are likely to have heard of. (It doesn't matter if they've not read them.)

Another option is to pick an idea from a book – e.g. Dante's nine circles of hell, or

Note: While titles themselves aren't copyright, part or all of the title may well be trademarked. You may prefer to use works that are out of copyright.

#4: Jon Morrow's "52 Headline Hacks"

In this great, free ebook, Jon Morrow gives you 52 templates – plus examples – of all sorts of different headline (which, in this context, is just another world for "blog post title").

This is a handy resource when you're brainstorming, as you can simply work through the list and come up with headlines that would suit your blog. You'll probably find that not all the different categories work for your style and audience, but you'll definitely get a great list of posts to write.

You do need to sign up for Jon's email list to get the ebook (you'll get an email whenever he publishes a new blog post, and occasionally when he's running a webinar or similar). Of course you can unsubscribe once you have the ebook, but I'd advise against it: Jon's posts are always well worth reading.

#5: Comments on Your Blog

Sometimes, readers may leave a brilliant idea in a comment. Perhaps a particular phrase they use is one that you realise rings true for your audience as a whole – and you could use that phrase in a title, or even as the whole title.

One of my most popular posts, 7 Habits of Serious Writers (which I mentioned above) was a title that a reader suggested to me in a comment. I actually thought it was a bit of an uninspiring title but went with it anyway – and I'm very glad I did!

It's always powerful to use the language your audience uses: it strengthens your connection with them, and it can even boost your search engine traffic, as the words you use match up better with the ones they use when searching.

So there you go – five places to find ideas. Which will you be trying out this week? Let us know in the comments … and if you come up with a brilliant title, share that with us too.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

What Would You Do For 100,000 Organic Impressions and Over 6,000 Clicks Every Month?

Posted: 10 Apr 2014 06:30 AM PDT

If you are looking for the next “brand new-shiny object” traffic strategy, no need to read further. This post is about an average small business owner, Peggy Mace, in a competitive market, going back to basics and turning the information in her head into over 100,000 organic search impressions in Google alone; without spending a dime.

Follow The Money! This seems to be the battle cry of every cop, FBI agent, and spy in every movie and tv show. Follow The Money!

When it comes to driving lots of high quality traffic online without a big budget (or any budget at all) It makes sense to look to the money industries. The industries which have historically been the most competitive in search. Of course I am referring to the insurance industry. If you want to know what really works. Follow the Money. Follow the Insurance Industry.

Several years ago I came across one of the easiest and most brilliantly simple strategies to make a few extra bucks. It was called Yahoo Answers, and if you could get chosen as the best answer, you would see your post rank in search engines. My friend would answer a handful of questions around getting rid of acne in Yahoo Answers, with well articulated answers, and a link to a parked domain with acne ads. He made about $50 a week for several years off about 20 minutes a day for one week. Not a bad Return on Investment.

Clarity.fm, a great service for getting paid for your time and expertise, built in a Q&A site so that users can demonstrate their subject matter expertise, and monetize that knowledge with the Clarity.fm platform.

Success online is all about community. All about authentic engagement. As counter-intuitive as it seems, deep, authentic engagement really does scale in an online environment. Especially within a community.

How could one on one conversations translate into scalable authority? Community is the answer. Every person on the internet is part of small overlapping social communities. Be it your friends from college, your coworkers, your neighbors, or people with similar interests. In fact, every blog discussion, every forum thread, and every Facebook post could be their own micro community of complete strangers coming together around a central theme, topic or interest.

All you need is one member of a community to authentically engage with, to create a ripple effect that spreads like wildfire.

Furthermore, once you commit an authentic, engaged contribution to a discussion, be it in a blog comment, on a forum, in a Linkedin group, or a Q&A site, you have a timeless contribution that countless people will be exposed to over the course of time. Your one time, seemingly un-scalable effort, leaves a lasting impression. In fact, this is one of the reasons I find the time to write for Shoemoney, my own blog, and other major publications. Content is Forever!

Every once is a while a brilliant website emerges that finds a way to make your content spread even further.

A way to reward contributing. InsuranceLibrary.com is one such website. They realized that Google is heavily promoting authorship to determine who is a subject matter expert on a topic, so they built into their Q&A site Google authorship markup for the licensed agents that answer questions. This basically means that when you contribute a meaningful answer to a consumers question, not only will that page potentially rank in search engines, but it will show your picture next to it, and hopefully help you grow your expertise in scale well beyond the capabilities within one single website. We don’t know how authorship will contribute to the future of search engine algorithms, but Google has made it clear that they want to surface content from subject matter experts. When agents contribute to insurance library and get attribution for it, they are not only building their reputation with their community but also with search engines.

As you can see in the screen shot above, Peggy Mace, who sells life insurance, discovered that this Google authorship idea is actually much more valuable than anyone realized. In her webmaster tools, it reported 99,954 impressions in search results, and 6,190 clicks in only one month. That is absolutely incredible. Simply taking the time to give high quality answers to insurance consumers questions, she has managed to reach a ridiculous amount of people.

I think we can all agree that establishing your expertise and authority on a topic is a sure fire way to the top.

Dan Kennedy always says, "It's no coincidence that the word Author is in the word Authority." Authoring content is the best way to become an authority. Robert Cialdini in his brilliant book about the psychology of persuasion explains that we are hard wired to trust authority figures to the point where we would do things we otherwise wouldn't if someone we perceived to be an authority figure directed us to. In fact, he cites a Yale study where regular average people seemingly tortured innocent people just because a fellow in a lab coat told them to give them a massive jolt of electricity for getting a question wrong. ( the tortured folks were actually actors, but the regular people torturing them had no idea.)We would even blindly follow someone in a suit and tie across a busy intersection, against the light, just because we assume a fellow in a suit and tie probably wouldn’t cross the street if it was dangerous.

The simple truth is that there is so much information overload that we are forced to use shortcuts to help navigate our daily lives. Most of this happens subconsciously, but we make all sorts of leaps in our minds based on previous experiences and preconceived notions. 85% of the time this serves us really well. Some people however use this knowledge to manipulate folks like us. If you really want to master the psychology of marketing, you must check out Shoemoney’s Weapons of Marketing.

The internet is starting to mature. What was once the wild wild west is slowly turning into sustainable strategies.

Chasing the next great traffic strategy was necessary when the old strategies barely worked, or stopped working. However, some strategies are timeless and have proven sustainable for 20 years of commercial internet usage, and will likely stick around for another 100+ years. Amongst those is creating content. Especially content that solves an immediate informational pain point of the very prospect you are trying to reach. Content marketing is here to stay. The bar is starting to rise, but the sooner you commit to contributing to online discussions, Q&A sites, forums, blog comments, etc… and realize that what seems likely not to scale, can actually drive success beyond what you can possibly imagine.

Forget about SEO and building links. Focus on building these authentic micro engagements and you will see massive success.

This one insurance agent, turned her knowledge in her head into reaching 100,000 people, and all it took was a willingness to invest in sharing what she knew with others with a community committed to helping its users reach the broadest audience possible with their content.

You can continue to chase the next big "grass-is-greener" traffic strategy, or you can become old and lame like me and stick to what works time and time again.